 I want to thank you for being willing to come and discuss your book, Sense of the Possible, an Introduction to Theology and Imagination. Understanding the relationship between theology and imagination is fundamental to the study and practice of ministry, and I'm looking forward to learning from what you have to say on this topic. My first question is, you argue in the book that there is no such thing as a lack of imagination, even in situations that seem to be devoid of change and creativity. What do you mean by this claim, and why do you think this is such a significant position to take? Thanks, and thanks for the question. I often will bring up this phrase, the lack of imagination. It's one of the first things I talk about in my courses on theology and imagination, and even in the context of parishes and congregations, when I talk about this stuff, sometimes I will often lead with that. And that's because certainly on behalf of folks who are interested in some kind of change, either because the status quo has not been kind to them and theirs, or because they have a passion for justice and a greater sense of hope and liberation within the church. What sometimes gets tagged as, you know, the problem with the contemporary age is a lack of imagination. I resist the idea of the current power system being a result of a lack of imagination because I think what's actually happening is that when we're being told that the present way of being is all that can ever be, what's happening is some more powerful, dominant imagination is getting slaughtered into what we call real. So we don't know what the future is like. Whenever we think about the future, we are imagining it. And so to be told that the only way that the future can pan out is like the way that the present is playing. It's not a failure of imagination. It's a profound success of the dominant imagination. And for those of us that are interested in change or in questions of what might be out at the edge of what's possible and some new ways of being, I want us to say let's not let the dominant imaginary be the thing that gets to tell us what's real. Let's allow for that to be a structure and a constellation of imaginations as well. And those of us that want to contest with it want to have some resistance to dominant or domineering kind of imaginaries and constellations of images and systems and symbols and beliefs wrestle with some resistant ones that are perhaps more attentive to those who are marginalized or on the edges of society. Places where there has been some suppression or repression. So let's not let the dominant imaginaries claim to tell us what's real and we're left with kind of picking up the table scraps of naivete or kind of utopian thinking. Instead let us recognize that whenever we're engaging with the horizon of tomorrow we're doing the work of imagining and those of us that have a vision for change and alteration of the present status quo are every bit as entitled to it as the folks who say nothing can change. My second question is in your chapter on imagination and doctrine you discuss how imagination and hope relate to one another. Can you speak a little to that point? Yeah. A lot of times when folks are talking about imagination especially in spaces in which people are excited about the imagination they want imagination to kind of go right alongside positive ideas. We can have a positive imagination for the future. Things can be different etc. And I am very cautious maybe to the point of neurotic about making sure to make clear that imagination isn't good. It's not bad either though. Imagination allows us to call to mind things that are not present. And so that can mean when I say think about what you had for breakfast imagine it you can smell the oatmeal you had or your toast or your coffee or whatever it is I can also say I want you to imagine kind of a dystopian future. And that doesn't currently exist but you may have seen little fractures of dystopian living poking through and you can grow those in your imagination to see what it is the world might be like. So imagination and hope are related exactly the same way that imagination and despair are related. They're two sides of the same coin which is to say what happens when we let our imaginations be colonized by everything will get worse is that we move into a space of despair and what we know from political spaces and political theology and liberation theology is that when we allow the principalities and the powers that be to determine how it is we imagine what's possible for our communities and the only place that we're taking wisdom from is those who are already in systems of power in places where the systems of power are not helping those who may perhaps most need it then what occurs is despair and what that is is just a certain kind of colonized narrowed vision of the future that is to say a particular imagination of how things will play out. Hope in that sense is just another way of attacking what the future might be like. It's the same exact sets of tools that allows despair to set in but used towards a different end. Tomorrow might be different and I think it's really crucial to recognize that despair and hope are both functions of imagination that's partly why I think imagination is so important to talk about in the context of theological education at large and in particular theological education that sees itself as being part of the work of ministerial support and guidance for the bettering of people or for liberation or for social justice or dignity for all beings. If we think we're doing those things then we need to recognize that we're not just working in the areas of argumentation, of reason, of rationality but we are absolutely working in the milieu of feeling, of affect of sense information and imagination which as I say is our sense of the possible. How can we imagine in a bodily way things different than they are and imagining things different than they are can go into this path of despair or it can go into this path of hope and for those of us that are religious leaders I think part of our task is to figure out how do we do the work of marshaling the resources of the tradition attending to what has come before and tying that into a new way of seeing what has yet to come one that isn't despairing one that doesn't think that all that is is all that ever will be but instead recognizes that God can always call us into a new thing and that we can meet God's call with kind of open mindedness and a willingness to be looking for the signs of the times that might point away to a thing that we haven't seen yet. So I think it's important to name despair and hope both as ways in which the imagination plays out in a social context and hopefully what I've done in the book is to show if that's the case then attending to the thing that gives rise to both of them is worth our study and attention. The latter half of the book is devoted to a focus on Christian practices. Can you say something about the connection between practices and imagination and why you believe this is an important connection? Yeah. So I mean I have to admit that part of what's going on there is you know that expression the hammer always sees everything as a nail, right? I was trained as a practical theologian and I'm by formation on the lookout for practices. So that's part of it is that my own disciplinary training is someone who it makes me interested in what it is that people do kind of in a material way. But kind of me aside, I do think there's something to be said about what it is that practices do to us as Christians. The practical theologian Don Browning says that practices kind of have in them often unacknowledged kind of a latent theory and then as practical theologians part of our job is to take a look at the practices that people are engaged in and see like what are the unspoken theoretical things inside of them not just in the academy but in congregations in people's faith life maybe even if they're not even going to church, right? If they're still praying and that's a meaningful thing to them like what's tucked inside of that practice like what's the undisclosed latent theory of how the world works that's in that practice. And I think there's a lot to be said about that and about Browning's kind of understanding of practice and that's fairly well discussed in the practical theology literature. But for me, I think it's really important and I'm hopeful about the possibility of recognizing that it's not just theory that's tucked inside I think practices also disclose a vision of the future so the way I say it is that practices have embedded inside them imaginaries that when we do things it points out to the way the world might be. Now, what's the difference between a theory and an imaginary? Well, on one level they share a lot of things in common but theoretical thinking tends to be a little bit more mappable in P's and Q's you know in a kind of logical orientation propositional if this is the case then this is the case and therefore whereas imaginaries are clusters or constellations of symbols of feelings of stories of myths of meaning that have some affective with an A emotional embodied consequence for people who are connected to those imaginaries but they might not be able to sketch out or even recognize the skeleton or scaffold of the theory behind them they operate in a way that has much more to do with feeling and emotion and a sense of connection to community and history and tradition then they do a theoretical underpinning. So, if we're interested in changing how we think about the future of our community for example if we want to engender a more hopeful orientation to the world not a naive kind of hopefulness that says everything's going to stay the way it is but someday eventually it'll get better just hold tight but a kind of critical hopefulness a kind of hard hopefulness that says not only do we want to have hope but we want to engage with the actual work of changing things materially well if we want to engender that and we think that part of engendering that requires helping people to use stories and symbols and meaning in new ways in new imaginative ways that are hopeful well then we need to figure out how to help them change those constellations and I think that if you just talk about it or write about it you're kind of just engaging with a kind of theory that's just a little more inchoate and instead I think that practices are necessary when I teach this stuff I say practices are the process by which imaginaries find a home in the flesh that if we just are talking about how we want the imagination to change we want the future to be it's not sufficient we need to figure out how to embody some of this potential future and we have to figure out how to embody that potential future in community so that when we pray for example that the kingdom on earth come as it is in heaven we're not just doing it because we're supposed to but there's some idea that the world is in such a way that God's will can be done that that way of imagining the world actually is easier to live into because we've done something with our bodies that reminds us of it so there's all kinds of reasons that have been written about for decades about why practices are worth studying what I'm interested to contributing to the conversation is a recognition that it also might be worth studying practices because inside of them there are these constellations of how the future might unfold and from the backwards forwards if we're interested in changing the names of these constellations or the ways that we look at how the future of our communities might be then one of the tools that we can have on our toolkit to engage with this work is to study imagination more seriously and to study how imagination and practices connect and finally is there anything else you would like others to know about this book yeah so some of this is just in terms of how I hope it gets used out there I really had three audiences in mind for this book the first is folks who are interested in dipping their toes in this information the literature on theology and imagination sounds like it should be really exciting and captivating and it is but it's often really hard to get into some of it's pretty technical and some of it presumes you've read all of Kant's critiques and you understand them and it says now based on that and it moves from there and it's hard especially for folks who haven't done graduate theological study and so it always struck me that the categories of imagination and theology are so exciting wouldn't it be useful to have a book that was a little more accessible that could get people into that literature so they could see if they were really into it instead of cracking open a book that seems like it should be interesting getting a couple chapters in and saying whoa this is way over my head so the first book is for anyone who's interested in the life of the church and thinking about imagination and maybe even folks who are interested in thinking about creativity I really focus on imagination as opposed to the arts because a lot of people are doing really good work on the arts and I really want to focus on the imagination specifically itself so the first group of folk that I encourage to pick up the book are people who just think they might be interested because I've tried to write the book in a way that it's quite accessible in terms of a reading perspective, each chapter ends with questions that you can use in small group discussions in a congregational setting or in an undergraduate classroom or something like that the second group of folks who I think might be interested are people who are graduate students who are looking for kind of a handy dandy toolkit because I've tried to do a good job articulating the voices and positions in a generous way from a lot of different people who have written at the work of imagination and theology so it really bibliographically is a kind of a treasure trove of what do folks need in there so that the back of the book is really useful too. There's a timeline in there starting from when the book of Proverbs was written all the way through 2022 in terms of all the major texts that have engaged with imagination and theology and so I hope it becomes like a resource book as well and then finally for folks who have already stepped down the path of doing imagination and theology work I hope that this book serves as a kind of a quick access guide, right? Since a lot of the material on imagination and theology is captured in there, you might not remember wait, who said that? Was that was that green or was that someone else and you can kind of flip in find the reference to the book you're thinking of like ah yes, it was green who said that so that for them it kind of becomes a quick and easy access guide to things that they might already know. So I hope that this book serves to broaden the interest in it I'm really hoping that this book becomes a teaching book that people realize it's a good like one-on-one entry level into some of these conversations and might even do the work of beefing up some people's classrooms and studies where the arts gets a lot of focus and the imagination gets used as a term kind of willy nilly without any fleshing out. Like this is a book that pays almost the entirety of its attention to the imagination and how it works within Christian theology and that might really help kind of flesh out the picture of people interested in aesthetics or theological aesthetics and theology in the arts. So hope it gets used and I hope it's useful for a whole bunch of folk. Thanks so much for your time here today and for giving us this very helpful introduction to your book.