Instead of coming to the imagination's rescue, the Church has panicked at its antics. As a result, we have let the imagination de-Christianize, losing in the process the conquests of centuries of education. Yet the Judeo-Christian tradition is an expert in such matters. . . . It has waged a millenial struggle for the imagination of humanity, with astonishing success. . . Our problem is thus not bolstering the imagination, but educating it, reconnecting it to its origin and end.

Janine Langan, "Truth, Justice, and the Modern Imagination"

The Christian imagination is anti-Gnostic. The Judeo-Christian imagination is not a flight from physical reality. . . . It refuses to separate salvation from creation, the life of the spirit from its inception in the flesh. . . . In the world to come, nothing good from this one will be lost, only transformed.

A Christian imagination does not see the world as a prison from which the soul must escape, but as the stage of humanity's interaction with its God. This world makes sense. God made it with a plan . . . ; it is the imagination's rule to delight in this plan. It sees reality not as a horror to abolish but as an ongoing revelation to orchestrate in praise, as an unfolding mystery in which we have a role.

Janine Langan, "The Christian Imagination"

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"