Sabbath-keeping for creative life: Christian spiritual practices of refreshment and inspiration for making life abundant with everyday creativity

This dissertation claims the power of Sabbath rest for a creative life and proposes an educational and practical program to demonstrate and confirm this power. Here, creative life means the life in which we awaken and use our creative potential to improve every aspect of our lives. Not only is creativity about every aspect of life, but also everyone has the creative potential to make life more abundant and beautiful. In this sense, creativity is "everyday creativity," an adaptation of psychologist Ruth Richards' term. Inspired by psychologists, including Richards, who highlight the everydayness of creativity, this dissertation argues that all everyday creativity is central to Christian adults as a means of finding new and meaningful ways of enlivening faith and improving life so as to be fully human in the midst of daily challenges and pressures. I suggest that keeping the Sabbath as a time of refreshment and inspiration is a particularly effective way of cultivating everyday creativity. For Sabbath-keeping gives us an opportunity to develop our creative personal traits and skills; it provides a framework for developing helpful habits and environments; and I suggest that, despite the lack of explicit research on Sabbath-keeping in creativity research, such rest from our daily routine allows new and brilliant ideas to emerge.;To this end, Chapter 1 explores the primary concept of everyday creativity by exploring the debate on and evidence of the everyday-ness of creativity. Chapter 2 describes the status of discourses on creativity in literature on Christian spirituality to verify the necessity of everyday creativity for the Christian life. Chapter 3 first names and sorts the meanings and roles Christians typically assign to Sabbath-keeping, then introduces some significant Sabbath-keeping practices, and finally appropriates some theoretical constructs that reinforce the important role of Sabbath-keeping for the creative life. Chapter 4 discusses theoretical foundations of spiritual formation and pedagogical elements for designing the program, and explains its structure and content. The program consists of a set of Sabbath-keeping practices as well as activities to help people understand the importance both of creativity and of Sabbath-keeping as a way to fuel this creativity. Chapter 5 explores the reasons for and benefits of such a program, as suggested by feedback from participants in such a demonstration program and by qualitative research methodologies and methods embodied in practical theology. Chapter 6 is a practical theological study of the Sabbath-keeping program for everyday creativity. It describes and analyses the program's outcomes. Finally, the Conclusion provides holistic reflections and suggestions for modifying the program for other situations and participants.