The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith

How can we live truthfully in a world riddled with ambiguity, contradiction, and clashing viewpoints? We make sense of the world imaginatively, resolving ambiguous and incomplete impressions into distinct forms and wholes. But the images, objects, words, and even lives of which we make sense in this way always have more or other possible meanings. Judith Wolfe argues that faith gives us courage both to shape our world creatively, and reverently to let things be more than we can imagine. Drawing on complementary materials from literature, psychology, art, and philosophy, her remarkable book demonstrates that Christian theology offers a potent way of imagining the world even as it brings us to the limits of our capacity to imagine. In revealing the significance of unseen depths – of what does not yet make sense to us, and the incomplete – Wolfe characterizes faith as trust in God that surpasses all imagination.

* Expanded version of the prestigious University of Cambridge Hulsean Lectures, 2022
* Wolfe is one of the most exciting and highly regarded theological talents currently at work in the British Isles
* Tackling as it does topical themes of imaginative creativity, art, literature and the end times (or eschatology), this is a book that will be highly appealing to readers in a number of fields, especially theology, philosophy, and literary studies
* Shows how theology is highly engaged with the world in that it illuminates modern problems even as it helps us to address them more deeply and constructivelyRead less