Based on the 2022 Cambridge Hulsean Lectures, this short book (c.50,000 words) is a finely argued text that successfully covers a wide range of issues. Imagination is seen at work in ordinary, everyday perception in the interaction between what we suppose ourselves to see and how this is modified and restructured by more social determinants such as wider inherited assumptions and presumed roles. This is to reject the existentialist search for an internal, self-sufficient authenticity, and instead to find “Christian faith . . . as a mode of seeing the world which beholds in that world an unseen depth of goodness, significance and love which we do not make but in which we can participate”.
In the next chapter, the late plays of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett are then used to illustrate how we can be challenged to revise those roles, sometimes in a more explicitly Christian direction, while, in the subsequent chapter, the way in which the visual artist or poet encourages new ways of perceiving (depth perception) is explored, and the parallel drawn with Christian faith in its capacity to “invest that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance”.
Book review: David Brown considers the part played by the imagination in theologyhttps://t.co/y892qeqqoe
— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) June 16, 2025