Music and the Creative Spirit is a book of interviews with today's innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde, including Pat Metheny, Regina Carter, Fred Anderson, John Zorn, Joshua Redman, and others.

The resource is designed to help spiritual directors and others use expressive arts in the context of spiritual direction. It is the latest book in the unique SDI series, designed for professional spiritual directors, but also useful for clergy, therapists, and Christian formation specialists. The Spiritual Directors International Series – This book is part of a special series produced by Morehouse Publishing in cooperation with Spiritual Directors International (SDI), a global network of some 6,000 spiritual directors and members.

Like most ground-breaking art forms, contemporary creative music is rarely understood or accepted in its own time, and for those reasons, can largely go unheard. Music and the Creative Spirit: Innovators in Jazz, Improvisation, and the Avant Garde aims to give today's brightest music innovators due recognition and respect, celebrating their work and creativity. Through personal interviews, artists such as Pat Metheny, Regina Carter, Joshua Redman, Fred Anderson, Dave Holland, Bill Frisell, David Murray, and John Zorn—to name just a few—offer clear, frank discussions about music, creativity, work, society, culture, current events, and more. Author Lloyd Peterson has hand picked these artists specifically for their ability to express themselves through their own creative voices and transcend their art form through the strength of their own ingenious spirit. Their music eschews categorization, genre, or style, and the book necessarily takes a broader view of jazz, tapping into the inventive aspect that is difficult to describe or teach, and is rarely discussed. By allowing the innovators an opportunity to speak for themselves, readers are afforded a clearer sense of their attitudes and approaches, their ways of working, and their views of contemporary music and society.

God's Creative Gift is an in-depth study for the creative Christian. It is intended for both professional and lay artists, for the casual crafter and hobbyist, and for those in both sacred and secular settings. It is for those who see things where others do not and for those whose imaginations cannot be confined by religious dogma and tradition. It is for musicians, singers, painters, sculptors, dancers, dramatists, writers, poets, carvers, weavers, film editors, photographers, filmmakers, architects, designers--anyone who finds inspiration in creativity. Focusing on the creative spirit within, it is designed to help you draw your inspiration from a Deeper Source. It is deeply rooted in Scripture--for the creative Christian must enter into the Word of God on a regular basis in order to know the choreographer of her steps, the crafter of her designs, the author and perfecter of her faith, and the sculptor of her creative heart, soul, mind, and body. And to know Him intimately.

Suggests a variety of activities designed to develop one's creativity, and tells how to live creatively free and develop a more positive and open outlook on life

Tap into your natural ability to create! Engaging, proven exercises for developing creativity Priceless resource for teachers, artists, actors, everyone Artist and educator Corita Kent inspired generations of artists, and the truth of her words "We can all talk, we can all write, and if the blocks are removed, we can all draw and paint and make things" still shines through. This revised edition of her classic work Learning by Heart features a new foreword and a chart of curriculum standards. Kent's original projects and exercises, developed through more than 30 years as an art teacher and richly illustrated with 300 thought-provoking images, are as inspiring and as freeing today as they were during her lifetime. Learn how to challenge fears, be open to new directions, recognize connections between objects and ideas, and much more in this remarkable, indispensable guide to freeing the creative spirit within all of us. With new material by art world heavyweights Susan Friel and Barbara Loste, Learning by Heart brings creative inspiration into the 21st century!