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

For Judith Wolfe, theology offers a potent way of imagining the world eve as it shows the limits of imagination.

Judith Wolfe (Author)

9781009519861, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2024

208 pages
22.3 x 14.7 x 1.6 cm, 0.41 kg

'No doubt it is appropriate that a book about imagination should be so imaginatively rich in form and substance as this one is, but it is astonishing nonetheless. Judith Wolfe's erudition and originality are both fully on display here – she moves with ease through the worlds of the arts, philosophy, theology, and psychology – but so also is the sheer elegance of her mind. And the vision of the theological imagination that emerges in these pages is at once profound and genuinely beautiful.' David Bentley Hart, University of Notre Dame

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.

1. Introduction: imagining a world
2. Making up a life
3. Bearing ambiguity
4. Looking for God
5. Finding an ending
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Theology [HRLB]