imagination on Storytelling

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian son...

Most of life is autobiographical for all of us—and so it was for [C. S.] Lewis. Growing out of his years of sorrow, especially the ones of watching his mother become sick and die, The Magician’s Neph...

There Are No Ordinary Things J. R. R. Tolkien tells a short story about an ordinary fellow who just wants to finish a painting. Over time, he is constantly distracted by the requests of his neighbors...

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. . . . The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling....

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

Fiction does not ask us to believe things,” he points out, “but to imagine them.” “Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that it will be...

The child became a man and the man became a preacher whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air. Wherever he was, he had...

Imagination “completes the picture” by transcending the actual memories and provable facts.

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of livi...

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having th...

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Author David Seamands once wrote, “Children are the best recorders but the worst interpreters.” I remember a lot about being a kid. I remember colors and moments, arguments and smells… Though my me...

But works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole. No human work can become whole by including everything, ...

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Children, in particular, are driven to create—if we just nudge them in that direction. They thrive in a world stocked with raw materials. But too often, and with the best of intentions, we fill their ...

Information alone never leads to transformation. Rather, it is what we experience as real on the inside that transforms us. That is all about the use of the imagination.

Ronald Rohlheiser begins his excellent book, Our One Great Act of Fidelity , with a story of a young girl. She had awoken from a nightmare, convinced that monsters had invaded her room and were comin...

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most...

[M]isery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of ...

Holy Spirit You are not just a whirlwind in the desert a tempest in a teapot You are also here in the slow growth of learning a nearly imperceptible accrual of wisdom Holy Spirit Inspire us from th...

“He’s just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be king”

Culture is what we make of the world. Culture is, first of all, the name for our relentless, restless human effort to take the world as it’s given to us and make something else.

Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it, and so diminishes eternity . . . for want of reflection, that we make a nothing of eternity and an eternity of nothing. ...

Every now and then it shows through the clouds that are moving across its face. One moment it looks like the eye of a hawk in profile. The next it looks like the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dol...

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

The challenge facing Christianity today is not a lack of motivation or resources, but a failure of imagination.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.