Timothy D. Willard's Blog

The name Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood referred to the groups’ opposition to the Royal Academy’s promotion of the Renaissance master Raphael. They were also in revolt against the triviality of the immensely popular genre painting of time.

Inspired by the theories of John Ruskin, who urged artists to ‘go to nature’, they believed in an art of serious subjects treated with maximum realism. Their principal themes were initially religious, but they also used subjects from literature and poetry, particul...

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John Ruskin (8 February 1819 – 20 January 1900) was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, philosopher, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, litera...

Some highlights from the Pew Research Forum

As the example of the unaffiliated shows, there will be vivid geographic differences in patterns of religious growth in the coming decades. One of the main determinants of that future growth is where each group is geographically concentrated today. Religions with many adherents in developing countries – where birth rates are high, and infant mortality rates generally have been falling – are likely to grow quickly. Much of the worldwide growth of Islam ...

On loneliness:

God created us as social beings. Love is the greatest thing in the world. For God is love, and when he made us in his own image, he gave us the capacity to love and to be loved. So we need each other. Yet marriage and family are not the only antidotes to loneliness.

Some pastors work on their own, isolated from their peers, and in consequence are lonely. But the New Testament plainly envisages that each local church will have a plural oversight. See, for example, Acts 14:23 and Titu...

I found this thank you note from Bri, my middle ten-year-old daughter, tucked in the pages of my journal. I wonder if God ever comes back to the prayers of his children, like I did when I rediscovered this note?

Since God exists outside of time, I imagine him seeing my tha...

1. I think first I should ask "Pardon" while I offend everyone who uses the #hashtag as a way to communicate their witty self, including, well, myself. 

a. The #hashtag (henceforth referenced as {#} ... ) began in the popular space in 2007 when Chris Messina tweeted #barcamp and suggested using the {#} as a way to form "groups" on Twitter.

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

Chris Messina (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

b. My extensive research on the robust...

C.S. Lewis warns leaders not to be someone they are not, says a Christian author. Imaginative leadership springs from men and women who understand the power of 'being yourself.'

As leaders, we can easily overdevelop our praxis and undervalue our selves. “Who am I?” however, proves infinitely more important than “How do I …?” If I am comfortable in my role as my self, then I will not pattern myself after the popular leader paradigm.

Instead, I will work in the confidence of my “baptized...

Who I am was forged on the long road behind me. The road? It’s tangled and hard and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Before working from home as a writer, researcher and dad to three faerie-princess-warriors in North Carolina, I was a forty-something Ph.D. student who stepped out of his writing career to obey God’s whispers.

Before I lived in Oxford studying beauty and C.S. Lewis, I lived in Atlanta, studying how to be a new father, husband, a seminarian at Gordon-Conwell Theological Semin...

Who are you trying to impress?

Stop it.

Whenever I detect behavior from my daughters that I know they’ve picked up from someone else, I ask them, “Is that who you are?”

They now the question is coming, and they’re quick with their retort: “No, Daddy.”

Cue the eye-roll. But I also sense they love the reminder. I think it’s because they know I’m not going to smack them upside their spirit with guilt or a harsh reprimand.

They know that I’m merely going to ask them. “Who are you again?”

Dear Friends,

To be known. It’s a primary human longing. We seek it in everything we do.

In our work and in our relationships, the desire to be known for something and by someone drives us.

The lack of “being known” also contributes to the growth of despair in our lives. Negatively, the drive to be known can consume us.

Kierkegaard said that despair is the consumption of the self. Kind of gross, actually. Social media, for example, exposes this deep desire in us and exploits it.

And yet, we c...