Yesterday, 1 July 2021, I started a year-long sabbatical. A privilege, I know. And one I’m grateful for. It’s a perk of being a professor to be stewarded with such time and space.
I am working on a book, tentatively titled “Faith and the Reconciled Imagination,” under contract with Fortress Press. Some decades ago and long before my time on the big blue marble, C.S. Lewis said of his experience of reading George MacDonald’s Phantastes, that it “baptized his imagination.” Along Lewis’ lines, I’m exploring faith (informed by the Finnish School of Luther Studies) as participation in the person of Christ as a reconciliation of the imagination.
The trajectory that the work is on is a conviction that faith in Jesus Christ reveals the world as it really is in Christ. Seeing it and living in it are an exercise of the reconciled imagination. Our unreconciled imagination sees through lenses of distrust and fear. The imagination of faith sees through Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, which is the reconciliation of the whole of the cosmos, i.e., Colossians 1.15-20.
I am updating my website (which I first put together during my first sabbatical in 2013) as a venue for sharing some thoughts and some of my images, especially those that related to this particular project.
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