“For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, then, not only is discord unavoidable, it is in fact necessary for the achievement of deeper forms of beauty. Although the loss resulting from the conflict between two individuals is tragic, this discord helps avoid tameness or ‘anesthesia’ by introducing uncertainty, unpredictability, and freedom. Discord plays an essential role in the procurement of beauty.¹¹ ‘Thus chaos is not to be identified with evil; for harmony requires the due coordination of chaos, vagueness, narrowness, and width’ (PR, 112). Or, as [Judith] Jones puts it, ‘The discord of intensities breathes life into a processive universe, forcing a constant adjustment of aesthetic achievement.’” –Brian Henning, The Ethics of Creativity, pg. 105

“Psychologists have a word to describe these mental blinders, these habits and assumptions and fixed ways of seeing: “set.” Set isn’t always a bad thing. We can’t figure everything out from the beginning every time we need to do something—we’d never do anything. Most of the time we have to rely on our habits to get us through, adding in a little thinking only when necessary. Lucky for us. Unlucky for us, though, “set” also blocks new ways of seeing. It blocks flexibility and creativity. Sometimes the ruts of habit can be so deep that we can’t see over the top of them, so to speak, which means we can’t even see that we’re in them. And then we’re really stuck.”
—Anthony Weston, Creativity for Critical Thinkers, pg. 10

“In fact life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead. Only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time. A rock survives for eight hundred million years; whereas the limit for a tree is about a thousand years, for a man or an elephant about fifty or one hundred years, for a dog about twelve years, for an insect about one year. The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. They certainly did not appear because they were better at the game than the rocks around them.” —Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason, pg. 4–5

The above passages are all from books I’m currently reading and I recently brought this quotational arrangement to one of our Sunday evening contemplative “potluck” liturgy gatherings. If you don’t know what a potluck liturgy gathering is, well, it sort of sums itself up; it’s like a potluck food/dining event but with liturgical items instead. So, in other words, we all bring something to share with the religious group that we might consider fit for sacred reflection, thanksgiving, remembrance, or for just helping to stay in tune with God and/or each other in some way. Sometimes people bring poems or stories, sometimes people bring songs or other creative activities, sometimes prayers or blessings are shared, and sometimes theological or philosophical passages are offered (as is frequently the case with me). Sometimes we have a theme, other times we do not. And just like our food-based potlucks (typically plant-based), it’s always fun to see how things blend together and, oftentimes, inexplicably astonish us. It’s a wonderfully creative activity.

We’ll get back to potlucks in a second, but speaking of creativity, this is a good spot to insert Anthony Weston’s pragmatic, handy-dandy definition of the term offered in his fun little intro to critical thinking book, Creativity for Critical Thinkers. I auspiciously picked up Weston’s book at the same used book store in which I also recently found the Whitehead book quoted from above—who, by the way, is another writer who has a lot to say about creativity! First, here is Weston:

“Creativity is the ability to cast a situation or challenge or problem in a new light and thereby open up possibilities in it that were not evident before.

Creative people are critical: they don’t stop with the “given” and the (supposedly) “obvious.” They are imaginative: they make a habit of thinking in more open and supple ways, keeping their minds two steps ahead of things as they are. They are inventive: they constantly seek to devise new things and new ways of thinking.

 And creative people are disciplined and persistent. Creativity can require a certain kind of playfulness…but it does not mean just letting go.”

On an immature note, I am personally (as well as compulsively and childishly) underlining the phrase ‘open and supple’ here in addition to the word playfulness; excellent word choices imo 😉♥️😆

All half-joking aside, I used the word pragmatic above purposefully because (according to wikipedia) Weston’s philosophical project (which involves developing conceptual “toolboxes” for “critical, creative, and constructive thinking…for social and environmental re-imagination and pragmatic ethical practice”) falls within the pragmatist school of philosophy and specifically mentions the influence of John Dewey‘s pragmatic social philosophy, which I’m also partial to. Given the admirable addition of Weston’s interest in Zen theory and practice it’s hard for me to believe that he would not also be at least somewhat familiar with Whitehead’s use of the term creativity in his Philosophy of Organism (and yes I’m aware Whitehead usually isn’t considered a card-carrying pragmatist). After all, in Process in Reality (p. 21), Whitehead does describe ‘Creativity’ as “the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.” Actually, when it comes to discussing Whiteheadian creativity at the personal or psychological level my mind immediately drifts to Bob Mesle’s paraphrasing of a wonderful Loomerian lesson on relational self-creativity:

“In the relational viewpoint you begin life as an effect produced by the many others in the world of your immediate past. But you are not simply a function of these relations. You are an emergent from your relationships; and in the process of your emergence you also create yourself…Your concrete life is constituted by a process of deciding what you will make out of what you have received. This is your emergent selfhood. What you make out of what you have received is who you are. This is also your emergent freedom because you are your decisions. Your subjective life is your process of deciding who you are.”

In a very real way we are our decisions (and thus every decision is a creative one), and as Weston explains above we often can’t figure everything out from the beginning every-time we try to do something so we end up relying on habits (ones we develop on our own and ones we learn/inherit from others in our environments) to get us through; this is the perceptual “set” that Weston is discussing above, it’s the predisposition we all have to perceive things in certain ways based on expectations/assumptions. Weston is essentially conveying the psychological (and age old religious and philosophical) insight that attachment to the wrong mental sets can definitely inhibit problem-solving and creativity. This is precisely why Weston argues that we need a creative method to break “set” and offers a few creative methods to help readers “think outside the box.” This brings us back to potlucks.

The creative exercise I chose for this recent potluck liturgy of ours was a perfect fit given the nature of the weird ritualistic activity, particularly the aspect of potlucks that involves uncertainty about what will be “served.” The practice that Weston affectionately calls Inviting Exotic Associations asks participants to:

“Start with any random ‘prompt’ at all, then ask what new ideas or associations it provokes when put together with your problem or question. The prompt itself can come from anywhere—literally anywhere: walking down the street, chance words in a conversation, a film, a dictionary, a textbook, a mystery, a dream, a magazine.”

Ok, sounds easy enough. An example exercise that Weston provides readers is the common brain-teaser/creative caffeine challenge of imagining new uses (10-25) for ordinary, everyday functional objects. A burned-out light bulb is suggested. Correctly, Weston writes on pg. 13 that with “no method at all you might come up with a few new uses,” like turning the bulb into a Christmas ornament or somehow maybe making earrings. But when we start inviting exotic associations magical things begin to happen. Weston describes opening a book that happened to be lying “amid the debris” on their desk (Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country ((which I’ve never heard of))) and randomly pointing to the word “cork-like.” From there Weston simply free associates, first wondering if burned out light bulbs could potentially be used as bottle stoppers, or maybe even made into containers of liquid themselves, like perhaps fancy thin champagne glasses for instance. Pretty creative and novel, I’d say. Importantly, Weston notes that “the prompt did what it was supposed to do: start me along a new path. A new path. One free association opened up the field for others.”

Using fee association here myself (actually this whole blog post has been rather poorly improvised), the idea of opening up new pathways brings to mind Catherine Keller’s wonderfully powerful and evocative description of Jesus’s creative and “radically mobile sense of truth,” one that flows like living water bursting “out of the territorialism of religion, of worship fixed here or there, mountain or Jerusalem, my group or yours, my church or your temple, mosque or yoga mat…God the spirit is in all of these places and containable in none.” So, again, the lesson: let us not get stuck in ruts but rather, as John Caputo might say, get in the habit of continually breaking up the crust of our ideological hearts.

So, for practicing this creative random-word method Weston gives us a few scenarios to imagine and this is the one I liked best:

“…create new names for school or professional sports teams. Right now there are, at best, only two or three types of sports team name: predatory animals (Hawks, Tigers, etc.), maybe; warlike attitudes (Avengers, Spartan’s, etc.); a few sport-specific names (United in soccer); and that’s about it. What else is possible? Musical terms? Food (Jambalaya? Fricassee? Cayenne Peppers?)? Landscapes? Cool Colors? Made-up words?”

In the spirit of Divine creative chaos that truthfully breaks up ideological crust and allows living water to flow forth, I suggested that the potluck liturgy group narrow our focus down a bit and come up with some new names for one of our local school districts: The Williamsport Area Millionaires. If you’re surprised that a tiny little city in central Pennsylvania has a mascot/team name that might be better suited for Beverly Hills or Miami Beach then you’re just not familiar with Williamsport‘s industrial capitalist history. According to sports writer, Leland Gordon:

“In the late 1800s, Williamsport had more millionaires per capita than any other city in the world, mostly fueled by the lumber trade. The town was once called the “Lumber Capital of the World” and many locals were reaping the benefits of the trade.

The school began in 1869 (not in the current buildings), and the mascot name was coined some time around the 1930s. Earlier names for the athletic teams included the Wolverines, the Black Shirts and the Billtowners.”

This really is a history that many people in the area are proud of. While I’ll admit that ‘Millionaires’ may not be the most problematic mascot/nickname in the world (there have been so many other terrible ones; shame on you Perkin High School!), it does have its fair share of problematic implications like: normalizing extreme wealth as an aspirational identity, alienating/erasing low-income students, and reinforcing class hierarchy. I mean, look, even if a million bucks ain’t much these days, the school definitely serves a mixed and working-class community so the name is not just abstractly problematic it is also just locally insulting since the median household income in Williamsport was about 49k in 2025; sadly, we might have some thrillionaires close-by gambling their meager paychecks away but I doubt there are many millionaires around here these days (apparently Milan has the most now…? But I sincerely do not give a shit).

So our group went ahead and invited exotic associations and we came up with some wonderful new names in just a brief amount of time. Here are just some:

• The River Rats
• The Brook Trout
• The Black Bears
• The Pierogi (someone was hungry)
• The Sojourners (a nod to some more Williamsport history, this time concerning the region’s notable role in the underground railroad)
• The Hill Billies
• The Stone Skippers
• The Story Tellers
• The Pacifists
• Religious Anarchists
• Freedom Fighters

Ok well maybe nothing super astonishing here but we’ve got a good start. We should, after all, ask the pragmatic question here: do we want our mascot/team name, which can rightly be thought of as the establishment of a habit (one in which the symbolic meaning underlying it is subtly communicated/transmitted through association), to last forever? If so we should listen to professor Whitehead’s advice above:

“The art of persistence is to be dead. Only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time.”

Although money is technically inorganic, we all know that we can’t take it with us when we die and most rich people figure this out eventually. This often leads to frantic, egotistical pursuits to endow things (or to “give back to the community” as it’s sometimes politely put) which, despite any short-term and minimal positive benefits to the community, seems mostly like a way to justify participation in—and express advocacy for—a continuously oppressive and crusty political-economy.

Once again, maybe we don’t want to be subtly communicating/transmitting to our young people that extreme wealth is an aspirational identity to pursue. Maybe we should remind ourselves more frequently about Jesus’s warning regarding the dangers of storing treasures on Earth. Maybe we should name ourselves after rocks or the beautiful mountains that surround the river valley in which we’re nestled, they deserve to be honored. Whitehead’s right: complex organisms will never beat rocks because we’re precariously fragile and severely deficient at the survival game; money won’t save us and we dare not serve Lord Mammon. Maybe we should go back to the “Wolverines,” the “Billtowners,” or the  “Black Shirts?” (Interestingly I looked into the Black Shirts name but could not find any reference to history or reason for naming; it could be a simple reference to a jersey color, and if it’s a political reference hopefully it’s a religious anarchy reference and not an Italian fascist one lol). There are actually so many options now that we’re thinking creatively, aren’t there?

I mean, hey, if we wanted to keep with the Victorian vibe, not change the logo too much, and stay with a three syllable ‘M’ word I suggest we change the name to The Williamsport Magicians! Funny enough, I came up with this name idea while writing this post and gazing at the logo. Hell, we’ve already got the top hat, and the cane can easily be transformed into a magic wand complete with a cute bunny peaking out of course. I can see it now: our kids perform magic inside AND outside the classroom as well as ON AND OFF the field! Now that’s a message I’m comfortable transmitting to young people. ABRACADABRA! May it be so!