Digital Creativity Potential for Theological Education
By Daniella Zsupan-Jerome
The arts have played a significant and consistent role in the Church’s history of communicating faith: the catacomb frescoes of Roman antiquity, the narrative programs of stained-glass windows of medieval France, and the staging of passion plays of colonial Mexico are just three examples among the myriad of ways the arts have served the evangelizing mission of the Church. Pope Benedict XVI’s 47th World Communications Day Message echoes this relationship as it contextualizes the digital media in this artistic heritage: The ability to employ the new languages is required, not just to keep up with the times, but precisely to enable the infinite richness of the Gospel to find forms of expression capable of reaching the minds and hearts of all.
In the digital environment the written word is often accompanied by images and sounds. Effective communication, as in the parables of Jesus, must involve the imagination and the affectivity of those we wish to invite to an encounter with the mystery of God’s love. In addition, we know Christian tradition has always been rich in signs and symbols: I think for example of the Cross, icons, images of the Virgin Mary, Christmas cribs, stained-glass windows, and pictures in our churches. A significant part of mankind’s artistic heritage has been created by artists and musicians who sought to express the truths of the faith. (Benedict XVI, January 24, 2013) As the Church continues to think about the new evangelization, seeking to communicate the Gospel in ways that are “new in ardor, method and expression” (John Paul II 1983), the digital media merit increasing consideration for communicating faith.
As Benedict XVI notes above, the digital media are highly visual, and akin in this sense to visual forms of communication and visual arts. Likewise, digital creativity can be classified as artistic, and the digital arts encompass an established category of artistic expression using the medium of digital technology. In the Church’s long tradition of engaging artistic expression for communicating faith, the digital arts and digital creativity are among its newly emerging forms. Like the arts before them and now along with them, the digital arts could serve the process of communicating faith, and more specifically, serve the process of the transmission of revelation as part of the essential mission of the Church. Because of this connection, creative engagement with the arts has rich potential for religious education, catechesis and faith formation, all of which are educational processes toward ecclesial identity and mission. Between the arts and education abides a solid connection, one that can manifest in a variety of ways.
To create art is but one way of engaging with it; one can also experience it as performer, audience, or critic. (Howard Gardner 1983; Maria Harris 1987) As such, creativity and creative expression is one aspect of art, and one way for incorporating the arts into an educational process. While creativity is a salient topic in educational literature (Maria Montessori 1965; Kathleen Fischer 1983; Howard Gardner 1983; Maria Harris 1987), it is also a contested one in the fields of theology and in digital media studies.
Theology has contrasted tradition with creativity, and adherence to tradition as the opposite of the boundless creative process (Avery Dulles 1992; Frank Burch Brown 2000). Some scholars in digital media studies question the possibility of creativity in the shallow and dispersed cognitive process engendered by the Internet. (Carr 2011; Lanier 2010) Acknowledging such contestations, this essay seeks to demonstrate the possibility of digital creativity and its potential for communicating the content of faith. Creativity as an aspect of theological education honors the imago Dei within the learner, and the innate creative spark of the human person that reveals his or her Creator. As opposed to necessarily challenging tradition, creativity, in fact, enables a living sense of faith, and the translation and transmission of the tradition in a viable way. In a practical and pedagogical sense, creative work demonstrates appropriation – both understanding the content and the ability to re-propose it anew. These qualities are essential to the new evangelization which invites new ardor, new methods, and new expression from the Church to proclaim the Word anew to this day and age. As one example of digital creativity, this essay offers digital story telling in the form of screen-capture projects as assessment for a graduate level theology course. Noting the creative potential and achievement of these projects, this essay also challenges the notion that Internet-mediated communication fundamentally eradicates deep reflection and creative thought and demonstrates instead that these digital stories are appropriate ways of communicating the content of faith in a personal, relational way that is authentic to the Gospel message.
Defining Creativity
The concept of creativity has evoked a spectrum of scholarly definitions. Ken Robinson approaches creativity from a historical-anthropological perspective and proposes “the process of having original ideas that have value.” (Blevins 2012) Sociologist Donald Levine offers four categories of creativity, including “creativity associated with problem solving, finding new ways of combining existing elements, spontaneous expression of energies, and invention of novel forms.” (Kay Kaufman Shelemay 2012, 241)
Educational pioneer Maria Montessori (1965) grounded her aesthetic approach in the imagination as “the power of creation,” a power that impels transformation and change in the learner, and this definition is adopted by religious education theorists like Maria Harris (1987) and Thomas Groome (1991). In a similar vein, curator and art historian Marcus Burke (2004, 155) associates creativity as the act of the artist “as creator imitating the prime Creator, God,” while theologian Gordon Kaufman (2007) speaks of creativity as emergence or as bringing something into being. These last two introduce a theological connotation we will explore in more detail below. From this small sampling of definitions, it is clear each discipline will offer a nuance for relevance to its own field. Nonetheless, varied definitions of creativity overlap as they all describe the generative emergence of something novel, and previously non-existent. When thinking about creativity and the creative process, this essential generativity is a salient concept across the disciplines and remains highly relevant for religious education and for the task of handing on the content of faith.
In his noted 2011 book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr presents a careful argument for a cause for alarm: Internet-mediated communication is re-wiring our brains in a way that prevents us from deep, reflective, and creative thought. He argues the Net encourages a scattered, distracted, and shallow way of gathering information, partly to cope with the information overload we experience when browsing the Internet. We skim and skip around, because there simply is too much information to take in and too little time for it. While his description rings true, he concludes by taking it a step further: because of this scattered experience of engaging with information, deep, reflective, creative thought is less and less possible when online. Carr’s conclusion is indeed alarming. Given the history of how media have shaped human communication and human thought (Ong, 1982), Carr paints a foreboding picture of our future. Without the cognitive capacity for deep, reflective, creative thought, what happens to prayer? What happens to theological reflection?
What happens to teaching and learning? If Carr is correct, then Internet-mediated communication poses a threat to faith formation and theological education as we know it. Technologist Jaron Lanier (2010) echoes this note of alarm. Like Carr, he warns the fundamental structure of internet-mediated communication narrows the possibility of what can be communicated through it. With regards to the educational possibilities of Internet-mediated communication, he states: The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. Their job is then to copy and transfer data around, to be a source of statistics, whether to be processed by tests at school or by advertising schemes elsewhere. What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good. Lanier’s critique likewise concerns creativity, or the lack thereof, in Internet-mediated communication.
When students are merely copying, pasting, and sharing information, where is the creative synthesis process that interprets the information and becomes part of the content as it is passed along? In his 2010 You are Not a Gadget, Lanier challenges the notion of digital creativity more specifically. Focusing on music as his example of artistic expression, Lanier contests that the flatness of digital music built of MIDI bits will never come close to real performance and real connection. For Lanier, the digital reification of creative expression “locks it in” and diminishes its spirit. He writes: “When you come upon a video clip or picture or stretch of writing that has been made available in the web 2.0 manner, you almost never have access to the history or locality in which it was perceived to have meaning by the anonymous person who left it there. A song might have been tender, or brave or redemptive in context, but those qualities will usually be lost. Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn’t correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud… Empathy – connection – is replaced by hive statistics.” (137)
Although the distinction between online and offline experience is becoming obsolete (Sherry Turkle 2011; Heidi Campbell 2012), Lanier’s manifesto intentionally revisits the difference between what is virtual and what is real and raises the philosophical questions around simulation and hyper-reality previously explored by thinkers like Jean Baudrillard (1983) and Albert Borgmann (1992). His critique rests on the observation that through digital media, the authentic interpersonal encounter is once-removed and limited by a medium essentially ones and zeros governed by algorithms.
How can real creativity emerge in this limited context? Given the challenges posed by voices like Carr and Lanier, the sheer existence of the digital arts and manifestations of digital creativity poses a quandary. If the very fabric of the internet limits the possibility of genuine creative thought, how might we account for these emerging expressions of creative work? In response, other scholarly voices from the field of education instead emphasize the possibilities for creativity wrought by the digital media, including digital story telling. (Bernard Robin 2008; Mary Hess 2012; Joe Lambert 2013; see also http://www.storycenter.org/ ) Among the broad range of creative expressions, digital story telling is the process of conveying a narrative as accompanied by an intentional collage of sound, image or video clips. Basic forms of this abound on YouTube: slideshows set to music about a specific theme are simple digital stories. Digital storytelling assumes human creativity; “technology is a powerful instrument of creativity” the Center for Digital Storytelling website asserts. Bernard Robin’s insightful observation can perhaps offer a bridge between these divergent approaches to digital media and the possibility of digital creativity.
According to Robin (2008): “advocates of instructional technologies in schools have, for many years, been urging educational administrators and policymakers to change the focus from the technology itself to ways that technology can be used to bring out the very best in how teachers teach and how students learn.” (221) Carr and Lanier’s focus centers on the technology, its inherent features and how these features may affect users who interact with it. Advocates of digital creativity and digital storytelling in education, on the other hand, focus on the transformative process of teaching and learning and how the digital media can play a constructive role in this. While remaining centered on persons rather than technologies, it becomes possible to glean the gift of the digital media for human creativity. This is a salient insight not only for education, but also for thinking about faith formation and evangelization in our digital age. Digital story telling as an educational tool is one such person-centered application of technology. Digital story telling enables the use of digital media to enable, empower, and enhance the voice of its narrator. When created by a group of people, a digital story also paves the way for collaboration and a creative harmony of voices. In sharing the story, connections are established even more widely, creating the potential for dialogue and community formation.
To create and tell a story can be transformative – for the person and for those who hear and see it. Mary Hess’ 2012 article “Mirror Neurons, the Development of Empathy and Digital Storytelling” establishes a compelling foundation for thinking about digital creativity in the form of storytelling for transformative faith formation. As Hess notes: “Those of us who regularly work with digital story telling as a form of faith formation are struck, experientially and anecdotally, by how powerful a process it is, and by how often the process of learning how to tell a story and then embedding that story in a digital format that can be widely shared, is transformative.” (408) In contrast to Carr and Lanier who lament our distractedness wrought by the digital media, Hess emphasizes the intentional slowing down, focus and reflection necessary for engaging in the process of creating a digital story; it is a meaning-making process she calls “significantly contemplative in a deep sense of that word.” (411) Her description is person-centered; the digital media serve to help the storyteller articulate and illuminate meaning. Hess and others (Blevins 2012) explore the neurological aspects of making a continued case for creativity (digital or otherwise) in religious education and faith formation.
Adding to this important conversation around the creative uses of digital media for religious education, in this essay I seek to raise some of the theological approaches to exploring digital creativity. Creativity and Theology Media scholars may contest the creative potential of the digital media, all the while educators who have witnessed the power of digital story telling affirm it. In theological discourse, creativity is likewise a contested term. As Avery Dulles (1992) points out, tradition and creativity are two terms that are in seeming opposition. The tradition ensures the preservation of the content or deposit of faith as it is handed down from generation to generation. The notion of creativity hovers uneasily around this, juxtaposing new horizons with the authentic preservation of what has been handed down. Frank Burch Brown (2000) echoes this uneasy relationship, noting that artistic creativity has been considered an obstacle on the spiritual path especially in the context of some ascetical traditions and practices.
The history of Christian art is well beyond the scope of this essay, but key moments therein demonstrate the theological complexity around creativity. This complexity is first inherited from the Jewish tradition, where depictions of the Divine were considered idolatrous, but also where worship spaces were still generally adorned, even with Scriptural scenes such as found in the third century Dura Europos Synagogue. Christian art develops, but not without resistance: the iconoclastic movements of the Byzantine East in the 8th century and of the Reformation West in the 16th century are two examples where creative approach and expression were questioned, challenged, destroyed, or steered in a new, more confined direction. In this complex history, Avery Dulles proposes a constructive reintegration of creativity and theology. As he points out, creativity is an essential part of the authentic preservation and handing on of the content of faith. The process of handing on the faith is not like a game of “hot potato” but one of authentic appropriation. Appropriation of the Gospel message in each generation, as well as in each culture, geographical area, or new context implies that the Gospel speaks to and transforms the lived experience of a particular community.
In Thomas Groome’s (1991) educational language, the story of the community encounters, is incorporated into and transformed by the Christian Story toward the Reign of God. This implies that the telling and proclamation of the Gospel message is always to some extent enculturated, so it resonates with the lived experience of the individual community of faith. A significant theological question that undergirds this is revelation: how God communicates Godself to humankind, and how is this divine self-communication handed on by the Church. This essential question of fundamental theology is also well beyond the scope of this present essay but it has been treated extensively elsewhere by Karl Rahner (1978), Rene Latourelle (1963), Avery Dulles (1983), Sandra Schneiders (1999) and others. For the present exploration of creativity and tradition, Rahner’s insight about the double mediation of Word and Spirit is particularly helpful. According to Rahner (1970), both Scripture and experience point to God’s self-communication as double mediation of both Word and Spirit. Within God’s singular act of self-communication, we may speak of an “’origin’ or ‘existence’ as it radically expresses and utters itself, and that self-communication’s welcoming acceptance brought about by himself.” (37)
The Word is that utterance or expression, and the Spirit empowers and illuminates its truth so it may be received. Without risking an artificial separation of revelation into distinct stages, Rahner’s insight is more so rooted in the human reality of communication: in a conversation, speaking the word and receiving it go hand in hand for authentic communication and understanding to occur. The story of Pentecost in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles illustrates the point Rahner is making about double mediation of Word and Spirit. In a sense, the disciples gathered in the upper room “have” the Word: they have walked with, learned from, and witnessed the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. They have also received the great commission to “go and tell” (Mark 16:15; Matthew 28:19), to share this Word with all the world. What they seem not to have before Pentecost is the “ability to speak” (Acts 2:4), the ability to share the Word in a way it can be understood and appropriated as truth. When the Spirit comes, they are empowered to do this, as attested both by the miracle of languages (Acts 2:5-13) and Peter’s long and powerfully articulate speech that compels three thousand people to be baptized (Acts 2:14-41). Word and Spirit operate together in this first public communication of the Gospel message after the departure of the Risen Lord.
Along these lines, Marcus Burke (2004) offers a close association between revelation, creativity, and the work of the Spirit. He cites the arts as means of communication that convey meaning on a profound level where words fail to or cannot yet express. He points to Romans 8:26, where “the Spirit intercedes for us in sighs too deep for words” to indicate the work of the Spirit animating this non-verbal (or pre-verbal) communication. For Burke, the gift of artistic creativity is its potential to communicate before and beyond words. The work of the Spirit is manifold, and the Spirit is also one that animates understanding. The gathering in Jerusalem of devout people from every nation (Acts 2:5) represent the diversity of context and cultures the Gospel message is destined for. It is by the work of the Spirit that the Word can resonate for each of these, that they can understand in their own language the message of ”God’s deeds and power.” (Acts 2:11) Within this story of the miracle of the languages are planted the seeds of interpretation and inculturation as part and parcel of proclaiming the Word of revelation.
God’s attribute is manifest here through the action of the Spirit that bridges the diverse experiences of people from all over the world to being able to understand and appropriate as truth the message of the Gospel. Dulles’ observation from above is worth noting here again: the transmission of revelation is not a game of “hot potato” but rather, the process of the Word speaking authentically to generation after generation, context after context. With this breadth of audience, creativity is necessary for the process of understanding, interpretation, and authentic handing on of the content of faith in each unique context. The theological foundations of creativity vis-à-vis tradition are but one aspect of exploring creativity for theological formation in the digital age. Another aspect stems from the image of God as Creator. As noted above, creativity is an attribute proper to God, and recalls God’s fundamental work of bringing forth existence and giving life to the world. Creativity in our human hands is a way of sharing in this divine attribute, a spiritual communion between the Divine source of all there is, and our finite attempts to honor this generativity through our own actions. Creativity can be a sacramental act, an icon that reveals the Creator and invites transformation. In this light, engaging in the creative process is both revelatory and redemptive. (Burke 2004) A key moment in the history of Christian art that brings this to focus is the Renaissance.
As Robert L. Nelson (2004) notes, this period saw the emergence of the individual artist, as well as the gradual separation of the arts from the religious sphere of society. Avery Dulles (1992) and Mary Ann Glendon (1992) both underscore that in classic and medieval philosophy creativity belongs only to God, and it is not until after the Renaissance that the adjective is applied to the human person. Humanism, including its emphasis on human genius, learning, and invention that flourished during this time, creates the context for the migration of creativity from an exclusively divine attribute to the idea of the human person sharing in this attribute through one’s own artistic expressions. The creative person’s work points to the Creator, and as such, creativity is a gift, a blessing, and a sharing in God’s generative act. Human creativity finds Scriptural support in the Genesis accounts of the creation of humankind. On the sixth day of creation, God fashions humankind in the divine image; “in his image and likeness” emphasized three times in these two verses (Gen. 1:26-27). The parallel creation account in Genesis 2 also showcases human creativity as God invites Adam to participate in the completion of the work by naming the wild animals and birds. (Gen. 2:19-20) The close association of the Creator and the human person made in the Creator’s image is fertile soil for theological exploration and continues to generate scholarly thought. (Gordon Kaufman 2007; Matthew Fox 1983) Theological approaches to creativity are manifold: ranging from iconoclasm on one end to imagining God as Creativity (Kaufman 2007) on the other.
The question centers not on the legitimacy of creativity, but rather on how much it serves or hinders divine-human communication and the life of faith. Rahner’s double mediation of Word and Spirit is helpful here toward a healthy balance between divine invitation and human response, between divine origin and human commission to hand on the faith. Creativity in this light is the space where the Spirit illuminates the Word so it can be received, understood, and move us toward transformation. Reception, understanding, and transformation are three words that approximate the process of faith, as it matures from an initial response to full conversion of mind and heart to Jesus Christ. Anchored in the Word, the creativity of the Spirit addresses us, each where we are, so we may be one. Human expressions of creativity, if grounded in such a theological foundation, can indeed enrich the spiritual path and present moments of sacramentality for artist and audience alike.
Digital Creativity and Handing on the Faith
Traditionally, engaging with the arts has implied specific roles: artist, performer, audience, or critic. (Gardner 1983; Harris 1987) With the advent of postmodernism in the mid-20th century, the barriers between these terms have increasingly blurred. Postmodern art breaks down the barrier between the work of art and the audience – at times it deliberately inserts the audience into the work of art. As the audience finds itself in the work of art as opposed to at a respectable viewing distance from it, postmodern art invites access and a sense of participation. Digital art and creativity, emerging out of the postmodern ethos toward new artistic horizons, is likewise a medium of access, participation, and collaboration.
The digital media rely on accessible tools for self-expression, and have the potential for easy and wide dissemination, along with direct feedback from the audience in such a way that feedback becomes part of the narrative itself. As noted above, a simple illustration of this is the digital story, a collage of image and sound one might create with an editing software, then post on YouTube to share with the world. The social web has made such creative self-expression widely possible. Given the persistent question of creativity in Christian theological history, coupled with the significant role of the arts in communicating faith, the potential of digital creativity for theological education merits exploration. If the digital arts fall in line with other forms of artistic expression, they likewise can have an “integrating, holistic ,and digesting quality” and in the context of a curriculum, “provide an oasis where people, in peace, let their understanding, their intellect and their feeling come together without pressure, but with the firm support from within the institution where they are learning.” (Harris 1987, 148.) Specific to the digital media is the way they are easily sharable, malleable, and incorporate feedback for overall meaning to emerge. In a sense, the digital work is communally created, as its sharing continues to generate its content, shaping the overall meaning.
In light of this particularity, how the simultaneously public-private nature of Internet-mediated communication effects the potential of the digital artwork to be a peaceful, integrative space, is a salient question for further exploration elsewhere. Another question that emerges is the challenge of honoring both Word and Spirit when engaging in digital creativity for handing on the content of faith. Digital communication is mediated; persons are separated by time, space, and the screen. Because of this mediating dynamic, the content of communication can be separated from the face-to-face presence of persons who are conveying and receiving it. This is not new; such is the case with letter-writing, voicemail, and even the telephone to some extent. With the digital media, however, the communication is both instantaneous and mediated, as the content is infinitely sharable and reproducible without necessarily carrying with it the presence of a person. Lanier critiques this reality above as he laments the decontextualized, simulated, forms of digital music as compared to a live performance. For digital creativity toward handing on the faith, this separation of persons and content demands keen awareness. As Dei Verbum’s paragraph 2 reminds us, Jesus Christ is both the mediator and fullness of revelation; he is both the content of faith and the Person who communicates it to the fullest. Given this ideal, digital creativity toward handing on the content of faith needs to intentionally preserve the personal and relational in its communication dynamic. How to go about this is a creative process in itself and poses an exciting and challenging question for further exploration.
To highlight the potential of digital creativity for theological education while keeping these two questions in mind, I close with an example. In a graduate course on ecclesiology and sacramental theology, I assigned as a final project the task of creating five-minute digital videos on a topic of choice within the realm of the course. A departure from the traditional research paper, this assignment sought creative demonstration of what the learner has appropriated in the course, using a primarily audio-visual medium. As students in a ministerial formation program, their broader audience for this project could also have been the ministerial context they served, such as catechesis, youth and young adult ministry, or religious education. As such, fostering digital media literacy was an intentional part of this assignment, to equip students with the skills necessary for communicating the Gospel message in a digital age. Mastering the software was a learning curve for all students. After a group orientation to the software, students worked independently or in pairs, and showcased their work on the last day of course. Successful projects exhibited a solid foundation in content, coupled with a creative and playful exploration of the capacity of the medium, as well as a sense of personal presence conveyed in the presentation, often through humor. The combination of these three elements begin to demonstrate the potential of digital creativity for handing on the faith, including adherence to the Word, creativity of the Spirit and conveying a personal, relational sense of presence throughout.
Conclusion
In his 1954 essay On a Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger said: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and un-concealment, take place, where aletheia, truth happens.” Echoing the language of Word and Spirit, Heidegger’s words are prophetic for thinking about digital creativity for handing on the content of faith. Creativity is a contested topic both in theology and in media studies, and yet both of these critiques seek the preservation of authentically human spirit expressing itself toward greater meaning.
Digital creativity has the potential to convey Word and Spirit in a relational fashion, but it also has the potential for disembodied content or communication that threatens the dignity of those involved. Technology can help reveal truth, but it can also communicate falsehood. Creative communication toward handing on the content of faith is intentional communication, one that invites the Spirit to animate the digital medium according to a values and practices of the Gospel message. Rooted in the Word, digital creativity by handing on the faith, discerns and follows the Spirit so the medium can authentically connect persons, form communities, and deepen communion.
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