The Theological Imagination

To live in the world, we have to imagine it—to make sense of things by seeing coherent wholes in underdetermined data. Christian theology is both a way of imagining the world and a challenge to our need and capacity to imagine. It helps us bring into view both the power and the risks of our continuous interplay of finding and making a world.

This course will bring together theology, philosophy, psychology, literature, and art to describe and interrogate the human imagination. We will examine the ways we inhabit our language, our life roles, and our world more widely, often without awareness of the imaginative work that co-constitutes them. The course will encourage us to see the life of faith as one of awareness both of the unseen depth of the world and of the things that do not make sense in it, trusting in a God beyond our power of imagining.