Our schools generally but little stress on educating imaginations. We tend to think of the imagination as "ice cream on the cake"--as flight, fancy, distraction, decoration. . . .

I fear that we still share this view of imagination's role in society: distracting, charming, and filling practical life with all the superficial and superflouus delights made possible by technology, the daughter of right reason. . . . [But] imagination is our fundamental mode of insertion iinto the world, and . . . therefore it has deep religious implications.

The imagination makes images out of the chaotic influx of our sense perceptions. . . None of our conscious intercourse with the world around us is free from the imagination's imput. . . . Its project is to propose a picture of the world in which we can fit, with which we can interact. It is purposive and selective; it proposes patterns. . . . Hence the importance of a healthy imagination: We access all reality, past, present, and future, through its screen. It colors our view of ourselves in the world from the ground up.

Educating the imagination--or controlling it--is thus of primordial importance. The secular world knows this. Advertisers, politicians, and totalitarian regimes have developed a science of this faculty, and a whole technology through which to manipulate it.

Logically, Christians should be well armed against such manipulation. They are heirs to the greatest imaginative tradition alive on this planet. In Christian theology, imaging has pride of place. Adam is defined as created in the image of God. The Incarnation, the very heart of Salvation, is imaging: Paul preaches Christ as "the image of the invisible God." Being a Christian is being called to further imaging. That Divine Image must be transmitted in ever new contexts, in words, in stone, in paint, above all in flesh, our own flesh, in His body, the church. . . .

Janine Langan, "The Christian Imagination"