2006 Lilly Fellows Program National Research Conference

The World and Christian Imagination

Thursday, November 9-Saturday, November 11

Program Description

The Christian mind, insofar as it appropriates the fullness of its imaginative possibilities, constitutes a resource of indispensable import for interpreting, understanding, and engaging the world in all of the diverse ways in which we encounter it. As such, the Christian imagination-far from sequestration as a term of trade for the conventionally regarded arts such as drama, literature, music, or painting-is much better regarded as a form of life whereby we live out, according to our diverse callings, faithfulness to the claims of Christ's good news.

The sources of the well-formed Christian imagination are many and sundry. Grounded in the affinity of human minds for truth, guided by the scriptural narratives wherein human meaning and purpose may be discerned, formed by the virtue-forming community of grace called the Church, challenged by the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of human experience, and attentive to the manifold witness of Christian culture through the ages-by all of these means, the Christian imagination is roused, by God's grace, to discern the world as it truly is and ought to be. Thus is it that the art, communities, dramas, economics, ethics, music, philosophies, politics, science, texts, and traditions to which Christians give expression fundamentally represent their imaginative obedience to "the vision from heaven," an obedience which prompted the Apostle to "take every thought captive to Christ."

St. Paul's charge to take every thought captive to Christ is a tall order for any person in any age. Especially in the modern and postmodern eras, however, the widespread confinement of religion to an affective, private realm has made fidelity to this command virtually impossible, for Christians in the contemporary world find themselves almost ineluctably shaped by forms of life, habits of mind, and orders of knowledge which are functionally atheistic, and hence not readily amenable to enchantment by the Christian imagination.

Fidelity to the Pauline injunction requires the recovery of a deeply Christian imagination, the capacity to envision all of reality as intrinsically related to God. While the challenges that stand in the way of fully realizing this capacity must not be dismissed, a reinvigorated culture, particularly expressed in the work of Christians in the academy, has astonishingly emerged in recent decades, bearing promise for animating anew the Christian imagination. Moreover, as postmodernism has shown imaginative judgments to be intrinsic to every social formation, Christian cultural renewal has shown signs of gathering force, and now, in a wide range of academic and professional disciplines, draws on Christian ideas to criticize and re-imagine spheres of life thought to be off-limits in a post-Enlightenment world to religious and theological conceptualization.

In this complex context, the 2006 LFP National Research Conference derives thematic coherence from a single, central, organizing question: How might the Christian imagination be brought to bear on all aspects of contemporary life? The World and Christian Imagination thus will assemble an interdisciplinary group of scholars for a national conference addressing the fecundity of the Christian imagination for scholarly understanding and interpretation of the world.

About the Lilly Fellows Program National Research Conference

The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University seeks to renew and enhance the connections between Christianity and the academic vocation at church-related colleges and universities. As one of its initiatives serving this aim, the annual LFP National Research Conference provides a forum for research and scholarship among faculty at institutions that are members of the LFP's National Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities. The conference fosters and promotes research that addresses issues of faith and learning, Christian practices of teaching, the relationship of religion and the academic disciplines, the relationship of the sacred and the secular, or other aspects of church-related higher education.