I share the following quotation because it gets at, in a somewhat indirect way, why we believe fostering imagination in children is so central to the life of faith. -Sam
“The Church needs artists because without art we cannot reach the world. The simple fact is that the imagination ‘gets you,’ even when your reason is completely against the idea of God. ‘Imagination communicates,’ as Arthur Danto says, ‘indefinable but inescapable truth.’ Those who read a book or listen to music expose themselves to that inescapable truth. There is a sort of schizophrenia that occurs if you are listening to Bach and you hear the glory of God and yet your mind says there is no God and there is no meaning. You are committed to believing nothing means anything and yet the music comes in and takes you over with your imagination. When you listen to great music, you can’t believe life is meaningless. Your heart knows what your mind is denying. We need Christian artists because we are never going to reach the world without great Christian art to go with great Christian talk.”
Tim Keller (via)
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Featured Image courtesy of Boekell/Boekell
S. D. Smith
This fits so well with a quote I heard earlier from an old lecture at L’Abri:
“Perhaps, then, the old trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply the dressed up, worn out formula we thought in our presumptuous, materialistic youth. If the crowns of these three trees meet (as most scholars have asserted) and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow— perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and thus complete the work of all three.”-Alexander Solzhenitsyn