Imagination Redeemed
Why did God tell Adam to name the animals? When you think about it, it’s an odd time to quit creating. He left it to humankind to look for the significance of the things He made, to derive meaning from it, and to join with Him to put the finishing touches on things for which He obviously had a clear vision. Understanding the dignity and responsibility inherent in the role of naming not only allows us to better understand our relationship with the created order, but also our relationship with God, the first Creator and Namer.
info_outline S3 E21 - A Story Full of Time (with Glenn Paauw)Imagination Redeemed
The Bible is filled with time because God’s revelation is always historical—a story of moments both old and new. God reveals who He is and what He’s doing within our ongoing story, our ongoing time. In this episode, Glenn Paauw shows us how the movement of the biblical narrative is always toward God entering into our time more and more deeply. It is a story of restoration, in which only through time is time conquered.
info_outline S3 E20 - The Art of Christian Memory (with Heidi White)Imagination Redeemed
These days we tend to take a dim view of the past. We struggle to overcome things (personal or corporate) we wish we could go back and undo. But Christianity teaches a different way of viewing the past: one in which “remember” is one of the most frequent commands in Scripture, in which gratitude is a discipline rather than a feeling, and in which nothing is outside the reach of Christ to redeem. In this episode, Heidi White will explore the posture that can enable Christians to be conservers of the goodness and beauty they’ve inherited, and restorers of things that have been broken.
info_outline S3 E19 - The Art of Subcreation (with Matthew Clark)Imagination Redeemed
Tolkien talked about “subcreation” - this thing we do when we take something God has made and create with it. When we try to make creation about ourselves—our pride, our desire for affirmation, and so on—we only make things harder. But when we understand it properly, our subcreation is a middle act between God’s first creation and His second—and the culture we build together becomes, as Andy Crouch put it, part of “the furniture of eternity.” In this episode, Matthew Clark explores this second of three aspects of our creative task as humans (cultivation, subcreation, and...
info_outline S3 E18 - How Gardens Teach Us to Cultivate (with Christina Brown and Amy Lee)Imagination Redeemed
At last year's Imagination Redeemed conference, Christina Brown and Amy Lee shared about the art of gardening and God's story. They covered their own journeys into gardening, how their experiences cultivating God's creation changed their relationships with Him and their families, and much more. In this episode, we revisit their talk on gardening and creative cultivation as part of our "Why We Create" series and in preparation for our upcoming Imagination Redeemed conference.
info_outline S3 E17 - The Craft of Cultivation (with Gracy Olmstead)Imagination Redeemed
Cultivation is a lost art for most of us. It requires paying attention—understanding each person and thing in its proper way. It requires love—viewing everything as the Creator does; not just as it is but as it can grow to be. And it requires agency—viewing ourselves not as a scourge upon nature but as people designed to be a blessing to it. In this episode, Brooke McIntire reads Gracy Olmstead's essay exploring how a posture of cultivation equips us to create as God made us to create.
info_outline S3 E16 - Why We Remember the Past Differently (with Heidi White)Imagination Redeemed
In preparation for Heidi White's keynote session on the Art of Christian Memory (which she'll give at our upcoming Imagination Redeemed conference), this episode revisits a talk she gave at our 2020 artists' retreat. In this lecture, Heidi explores the two different attitudes we can have toward the past, and how each needs the other in order to healthily live in the present. This balanced perspective encourages courage and fortitude in artistry, but also serves as a primer on political theology as well.
info_outline S3 E15 - Why Christians Need Mythology (with Heidi White)Imagination Redeemed
How are we supposed to grapple with the past—the good, the bad, and the ugly? Why does the Bible talk about remembering so much? And can storytelling be a way to use the past to remind ourselves who we are? In this episode, Brooke McIntire shares this month's essay by Heidi White on mythmaking, and the questions surrounding creation as an act of shared memory.
info_outline S3 E14 - Incarnation and Imagination (with Malcolm Guite)Imagination Redeemed
Christ's incarnation is the spark of Christian creativity. Poet, rock musician, and priest Malcolm Guite joins the show to make the case for this, journeying through Shakespeare and the Gospel of John. He also tells us why he loves the Anselm Society's name.
info_outline S3 E13 - How Our Creating Is (and Isn't) Like God's (by Peter Leithart)Imagination Redeemed
Why did God make us? What do our personal journeys represent in the grand scale of things? Is it really true that things like feasting and creating are acts of war against the Enemy that besets us? In this episode, Brian kicks off this month's theme of "Imago Dei" by sharing Peter Leithart's essay Creators Imaging the Creator, which explores the hinge question of our "Why We Create" series: what does it mean to be human?
info_outlineTolkien talked about “subcreation” - this thing we do when we take something God has made and create with it. When we try to make creation about ourselves—our pride, our desire for affirmation, and so on—we only make things harder. But when we understand it properly, our subcreation is a middle act between God’s first creation and His second—and the culture we build together becomes, as Andy Crouch put it, part of “the furniture of eternity.” In this episode, Matthew Clark explores this second of three aspects of our creative task as humans (cultivation, subcreation, and naming).