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Description
This book explores the vital role of the imagination in today’s complex climates—cultural, environmental, political, racial, religious, spiritual, intellectual, etc. It asks: What contribution do the arts make in a world facing the impacts of globalism, climate change, pandemics, and losses of culture? What wisdom and insight, and orientation for birthing hope and action in the world, do the arts offer to religious faith and to theological reflection?
These essays, poems, and short reflections—written by art practitioners and academics from a diversity of cultures and religious traditions—demonstrate the complex cross-cultural nature of this conversation, examining critical questions in dialogue with various art forms and practices, and offering a way of understanding how the human imagination is formed, sustained, employed, and expanded. Marked by beauty and wonder, as well as incisive critique, it is a unique collection that brings unexpected voices into a global conversation about imagining human futures.
Table of Contents
Foreword – Ben Quash
Daring Imagination – Jason Goroncy
The Cloud of Unknowing – Jordie Albiston
Yolŋu Scriptures and Hermeneutics: Mäna/Bul’manydji – Maratja Dhamarrandji, with Jione Havea
Having Eyes to See: An Interview with Emmanuel Garibay – Emmanuel Garibay, with Rod Pattenden
Why Imagination Matters – Trevor Hart
Painting: A Contemplative Action in the Time of Pandemic – Douglas Purnell
The Objects of Our Loyalties and the Power of Inanimate Objects – Robin Jensen
The Shadow of the Cross – Robert Cording
“If I Say …”: Poetry “after God” in Times of Eco-social and Ecclesial Trauma – Anne Elvey
Timpani – Julie Perrin
Hope at the End of History – Scott Kirkland
Home – Petra White
Every Life Can Sing – Trish Watts
“I Am Making Everything New!”: Textless Music and the Expansion of the Christian Imaginary in Times of Disruption – Jennifer Wakeling
Journal de l’Année de la Peste – Kevin Hart
Setting the Record Straight: The Prophetic Art of Ai Weiwei – Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
What Do I Paint Now? – Alfonse Borysewicz
Imagination and the Sacred: Contemporary Australian Fictions of Hybridity – Lyn McCredden
Process Sequence – Paul Mitchell
“It’ll Take You Way Down to the Wilderness”: Theology in Conversation with the Films of Rolf de Heer and David Gulpilil – Katherine Rainger
Grass Cloak – Penny Dunstan
“My Past Has Thrown Me Out”: Reading Samuel Beckett’s Plays in an Age of Trauma – Jason Goroncy
Fellowship – Christian Wiman
Do You Believe in God? – Pádraig Ó Tuama
Imagined Conversations and Real Letters during COVID-Times – Naomi Wolfe
Circular Repetition – Karly Michelle Edgar
Ida Nangala Granites – Steve Bevis
George Gittoes: The Artist as Prophet and Mystic – Rod Pattenden
The Portable Church – John Foulcher
Who Is an Artist, and Who Cares Anyway? – Libby Byrne
Compelling Stories – Glenn Loughrey
Figure Held in Water – Michael Symmons Roberts
“Goin’ to the City”: African American Folk Ritual for Communal Healing – Amina McIntyre
What to Make of This, What to Make – Scott Cairns
Endorsements
‘This is an extraordinarily energetic—and imaginative!—collection of essays and artistic initiatives. It is, in multiple senses, a collection “for our time”, and opens up a range of fresh futures for the ever-growing interchange between theology and the arts’. — Jeremy Begbie, Duke University
‘Rising phoenix-like from a COVID-19-canceled conference, Imagination in an Age of Crisis is a collection of fine essays, poems, reflections, visual artworks, and more responding to the sort of questions that have been playing on our minds. Are the arts a luxury we can ill afford in a time of pandemic? What role does imagination play in building hope? … This is a book to be savored, shared, and discussed. All that is missing is the soundtrack!’ — Jane Foulcher, Charles Sturt University
‘This impressive collection ranges widely in its offering of imaginative responses to threat and suffering. Some deeply affecting presentations of poetry and visual art are set alongside more conventional theological reflection on figures as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Ai Weiwei, or Aboriginal art and African American folk religion. Best digested gradually, it provides a rich feast of insights along the way’. — David Brown, University of St Andrews
‘This remarkable collection of pieces succeeds in showing how imagination can create alternative modes of living and being at a time of crisis. Jason Goroncy’s opening contribution, claiming a place for revelation, or “fresh vision”, in both art and theology, impressively sets the tone for what follows, where the editors skillfully bring together practitioners and theorists to demonstrate convincingly how imagination is formed and offers hope for our future’. — Paul Fiddes, University of Oxford
‘Goroncy and Pattenden have assembled a remarkable collection of reflections on the power of the imagination to instill hope and meaning in disturbing times. … This volume is a breath of fresh air. It will leave the reader with an abiding sense of what it means to be a human being in a world beloved of God’. — Stephen Pickard, Charles Sturt University
‘This carefully curated treasury of essays and creative works showcases the strength and diversity of the Christian imagination in Australia. Thirty-three academics and artists contribute criticism, poems, images and reflections that explore the ways imagination makes possible the articulation of hope. Emerging from the COVID19 pandemic, the collection’s context and substance show that imagination is not a luxury; it is a prerequisite to survival, a necessary spiritual discipline and a practice essential to faith’. — Greg Clarke, Meredith Lake, and Catherine Place, judges for the 2023 Australian Christian Book of the Year.
The editors acknowledge the generous assistance of the Australian Research Theology Foundation Inc. for a grant to support this publication.
Ordering
Art/s and Theology Australia 