In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy’s escape from prison, the scene culminates with "the crucuified innocent man arms outstretched to the heavens and washed (baptized) by the rain" is reborn to a new life.

The Vietnam War photo by photographer, Don McCullin, US Marine wounded in the legs, the Citadel, Tet Offensive, February, 1968. The soldier’s arms are across the shoulders of two other soldiers. Again the photo is a stark reminder of Christ on the cross.

The crucifixion image (by LA Times photographer, Don Bartletti) on the book cover of A Promised Land, A Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration edited by Dan Groody and Gioacchino Campese and Groody’s documentary, Dying to Live: A Migrant’s Journey. The photo of a 22- year old man with outstretched arms hanging on and standing on a small metal protuberance between two rail cars for 15 hours exhausted and pleading for mercy.

I find these images more gripping and compelling than the images depicted in the famous art works depicting Christ on the cross. These are for me the “icons", not those hanging on museum walls. These resonate, those don't.

Peter Beisheim, Stonehill College, MA
pbeisheim@stonehill.edu
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I wonder how all of us will enact a religious imagination that remembers these brothers and sisters in our midst today.
How will we witness to their full dignity as our brothers and sisters in Christ?

I hope everyone will join in tonight in a National Moment of Silence to remember all people who have died due to police brutality, especially most recently the unarmed Michael Brown of Ferguson, Mo and Ezell Ford, of Los Angeles.
You can find your local nonviolent moment of silence at https://www.facebook.com/NMOS2014

Alex Mikulich Jesuit Social Research Institute, Loyola University
mikulich@loyno.edu
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3. Imagination, fantasy, and ultimate reality

As a Christian, I have found that the religious imagination parallels the educational imagination. To begin, I have found that the religious imagination enables me and others to connect with God. As an example, consider the following passage from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (about Joan of Arc):

JOAN: "I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God."
ROBERT: "They come from your imagination."
JOAN: "Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us." (1.37-1.39)

In this passage, Robert equates the imagination with fantasy. Joan’s response shows that she recognizes that the primary role of imagination is not to fantasize, but to move us beyond our own inner thoughts to connect us with reality, including Ultimate Reality.

In my experience, striving imaginatively to connect with God can sometimes lead us to a deeper level of imagining. It can direct our imagination to the deeper, spiritual meaning of life, and can enable us to recognize the limitations of the ways we look at others and the world. As such, it can disrupt our lives. To give a practical example, I sometimes encounter students and, dare I say colleagues, whom I have difficulty understanding and even liking as persons. Their ways of being in the world are so different than mine, that I not only find few if any points of contact between our lives, but their ways of thinking and acting seem to be contrary to my own. When I bring my thoughts and cares of the day to prayer, I find that whenever I have difficulties relating to others I am led to reflect on these difficulties. At such times, I am often led to imagine these others as children of God, as people whom God loves dearly. And my own failure in appreciating their good qualities, let alone loving them, is revealed as a failure of my religious imagination. As such time, I am challenged to recognize my own poverty of spirit, and to be open to imagining ways of moving beyond my limited outlook on life in relating to others.

Finally, I have found that the deepest levels of the religious imagination go beyond what can be labeled as the connective and disruptive imaginations. That is, when we attune ourselves to the play of imagination, we can come to recognize that imagination can be sparked by experiences of beauty, the sacred, and the divine, or by witnessing acts of care, courage, or compassion. In such cases, the images that fuel our imagination are revealed from beyond us. This third quality of the religious imagination, which can be called the receptive imagination, can foster a life-giving and life-sustaining relationship with God – a relationship that calls us to connect with others and God, to recognize the limitations in our abilities to connect with God and others, and to be open to the many ways God is continually calling us beyond our limitations to be open to imagining what Ignatius of Loyola called “the more,” the greater fullness of life made possible by the grace of God.

Bud Horell, Fordham University
horell@fordham.edu
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4. Remembering past images

1. From the first grade, my imagination has been nourished by reading. The first book I ever read was about a boy and a sail boat. From time to time my imagination has been shocked, so to speak, to a new level, by something I have read. I learned that there were other worlds. I will mention several here.

In 1966 just before going to novitiate I was given to read Louis Bouyer’s The Meaning of Monastic Life in which he talks about Gregory of Nyssa view that a monk must take the place of a fallen angel in the great created cosmos that praises the triune God, to fill a gap in the praise. I was stunned to think that there might be so much more than could be seen.

In 1974 I read Erickson’s Gandhi’s Truth. Again I was stunned and shocked. There was another world that was not middle-class and American, that did not march to our psychological dream-stages.

However, the most important book I have ever read was Chesterton’s Saint Francis back when I was a sophomore in high school. I copied the following, and still have it in a prayer-book, and have prayed and meditated it now for some fifty-two years.

“If a man saw the world upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasize the idea of dependence. There is a Latin and literal connection; for the very word dependence means hanging. It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round. But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.”

2. I don’t have a five- or ten-year plan. But if I did, I would like to follow Chesterton’s advice [or is it Saint Francis’?]. It would be to learn to be dependent and to see things upside down, at least in an ever nearer approximation. So my project in imagination is to try experiments in dependence, and to learn to be thankful.

Dan Sheridan, Saint Joseph's College, ME
dsherida@sjcme.edu
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Dan Sheridan's account brings to my mind images that have deeply affected my life. First, in childhood (1945-50) there are stunning and frightening images of the Holocaust which completely transformed/replaced the mild anti-judaism of my Catholic education. I'm still, seventy years later, pursuing the meaning of those photos and films in a near neurotic viewing of documentaries. They do permit imaginative access to an evil that is as pure as we can encounter in this life and make me cry out to the God of the poor and persecuted. It was from these and from the teenage fear of Soviet Communism that I conceived a vocation, volunteering as a way of putting myself between the threats of evil and the church. This vocation was furthered by the Stations of the Cross traversed on Friday afternoons in Lent with the three hundred students in my parish school.

Second, when I was in my forties and on a retreat in a Jesuit house on the seaside, I went for dinner at a port side restaurant. At the end I stood on the walkway beside the restaurant and had what for me was a blinding image of the crucifixion and found myself weeping after a short "dialogue" with the Father on the simple yet accusatory question "Why? Where were You?" I didn't get an answer in the images but I did calm down enough to drive, and find now thirty five years later that the question which plagued me, though it has remained, hasn't driven me to the edge of faith as it once did, for God is now a Mystery which undermines the mystery of evil.

Third, unable to abandon my fascination with evil, I have spent a lot of time in the past few years reading accounts of the sexual abuse of children by priests-- images and stories of which I place next to the Holocaust in my catalogue of images of evil. I've been writing reflections on this string. In my youth the Church was the place of rest and resistance to the evil from without. But now Pope Benedict and I agree: the evil, the Evil One, is within. What a turnover of images! What a joy it is to live in beyond evil in a community of hope,

William Shea, College of the Holy Cross, MA
wshea@holycross.edu
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6. From fundamentalism to sacramental discovery

I use the term, religious imagination, to talk about the role of the "first element of religion", or the Child's way, in von Hügel's theory of the Three Elements of Religions (I write about this in Your Grown Up Faith). But my perspective on this is a bit odd, because my religious imagination was initially formed in a Southern fundamentalist context, shaped by a particular way of reading scripture and understanding society in the 1950s and 1960s. I recognize many of the things Bill talks about (the horror of images of violence from WWII, fear of Communism, dread of "Evil" that seemed to be "winning").

Yet I discovered, as Bill did, in a mystical encounter a reshaping of my religious imagination. Mine was in the context of Episcopal liturgies and a discovery of the sacramental presence of Christ in the eucharist (before I knew anything of sacramentality). That powerful impression of divine presence in created matter changed the way I perceived the world, and reshaped that rather bleak perspective on the world that had been so much a part of my earlier understanding of the world. I became convinced that creation was fundamentally "good" and held the potential to communicate God's love and mercy. I not only converted to Catholicism, but spent five years as a monk.

Many years later, in 2007, when I began teaching in prisons, my appreciation of that sacramental principle deepened. At first I could not comprehend why the time with my students was so special. I finally realized that I was experiencing the "sacramental" truth of Matthew 25. My incarcerated students understand this concept well, and have begun to own it, for even as they feel their "religious imagination" fed by all those from Saint Louis University who come to be present to them, they also have a deep sense (because they hear it from us so often) that they are in persona Christi for us.

Religious imagination is powerful and transformative, and if we are open and malleable, can be reshaped over the course of a lifetime. I could have never imagined in my fundamentalist childhood that I would seek out prisons as spaces to be in the presence of Christ, yet these days I look forward to going to prison more than going to church.

Kenneth Parker, Saint Louis University
kennethlparker@gmail.com
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7. Sociological Musings on the religious imagination

In 1983-1984 Andrew Greeley personally funded some questions in the General Social Surveys to measure religious imagination. Being a quantitative sociologist of religion by training (which i received in part from Fr. Greeley) I went back to that source and crunched a few numbers using a technique known as factor analysis. This statistical wizardry reveals two imaginations -- images of God as imminent in creation and everyday life contrasted to the divine as "other", external and "out there". Two "factors" emerged -- one heavily tilted toward imaging God in traditional terms as judge, redeemer, master, king, liberator, healer and father. The other cluster (meaning respondents to this survey imagined God in similar metrics and dimensions) was more relational: God as lover, mother and spouse. So, this "grace scale" as Greeley developed it for the second cluster correlates more feminine imagery of the divine.

Father Greeley points out in The Catholic Imagination, The Religious Imagination and countless other books and articles (you know, "no thought unpublished" was Greeley's legacy)...that David Tracy's "analogical" and "dialogical" or (better known now as) "dialectical" imagination is reflected in how people perceive and experience the ineffable, God or the "uniquely real" (anthropologist Clifford Geertz's term). The dialectical or Protestant apprehension of the divine is something of a corrective for the "God is everywhere" analogical or Catholic religious imagination. In the grubby world of empirical survey research Protestants tended more toward the traditional cluster. Catholics scored significantly higher on the "grace scale" where God is seen as more relational and caring, albeit through some sexist popular imagery about females being more relational than men. Still, I suppose the analogical religious imagination is closer to the "grace scale" survey responses and the dialectical is closer to the traditional images of the first cluster.

So, what does this mean? Religion is “pre-mordial” (pre-rational) according to Tracy and Greeley. Perceptions of the divine and their cultic expression in faith communities and rituals are largely metaphorical, expressed best in human story telling. They work on our consciousness at multiple levels, filtered through personal biography but also through myths and archetypes absorbed and sifted through socialization and acculturation. Protestant, Catholic, non-western, non-Abrahamic, pagan and even atheist metaphors are most powerful in stories and experience. It is one thing to answer a survey question about imagining God as a lover or spouse and something quite different to see the divine through the gritty, raw experience of religion as lived by real, breathing, sentient human beings situated in a habitus of culture, the life course, generations, race, class, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. It is possible and empirically a truism that we perceive God in various ways depending upon who we are, our experiences, inspiration and other filters.

Father Greeley told it to me this way: As a Catholic he experienced or imagined God in the minutiae of everyday living, not so much as the judge or king who is external to our world. Here is a classic Greeley story that conveyed what he meant. He described the first warm day of spring in his beloved Chicago. A bus pulls up in front of the Art Institute. The door opens. A little girl gets out with her dad, looks up at Father Greeley and smiles. Andy said this smile was a trigger for experiencing the divine, relying on a William James – Varieties of Religious Experience – kind of understanding of how the divine pops through the clouds every so often, bops us upside the head and reminds us that we just might not be alone in the universe. Humans hate being alone. That is the essence of the religious imagination – stories of human lives in those peak experience moments, those epiphanies that help us reach farther and connect to the "uniquely real".

Wayne Thompson, Carthage College, WI
wthompson@carthage.edu
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Mommy imagination overtakes the nooks and crannies of consciousness with ideas on how to entertain children, what to make for supper, what story to invent for bedtime reading. The bits and pieces from our parents or other child-raising sages are cobbled together with new experiences and prudent advice to shape this new family whatever it will be. Collected mommy memory tapes can inflict aloofness or unconditional love, too much of one thing, not enough of another. Even imagination is bound by the limits and scars of experience.

When we reflect on religious imagination--if we think of it at all--we might picture metaphorically drawing something from the air. Unaware, we breathe in sweet feelings. These congeal into good ideas and perhaps prompt good works. The seemingly invisible inhalant is already saturated with ideas about God, our relationship to God, and our responsibilities that flow from it. We draw the air of our religious imagination from our parents, teachers, narratives, the cacophony of culture, our own unique experiences. We shape God and therefore ourselves from what we take or reject from the sources around us.

Predictably this atmosphere is polluted by what traditionally we have called original sin. It is not pure. There are "particles" of evil which dilute it. Do we construct a stern God, a judge who catalogs our good and bad deeds? Is our God an indulgent God, who smiles on whatever we do; or so distant that we cannot know or relate?

Perhaps God is “Emmanuel,” God with us, here to surprise us with new revelation and intimate love? If we open ourselves to the pure oxygen of God’s love it can enrich our limited vision. In that pure imagination we begin to see ourselves as we are: fallible but loved as we are, precisely in our flawed and vulnerable reality. When we begin to breathe this air; we will discover our center, where God dwells. And when that center is embraced, it is the embrace of God.

Dee Christie, John Carroll University
dlchristie@aol.com
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9. Keep the light of faith burning

I noted the challenge for women to join the conversation. I have often issued the same challenge, as I have struggled to make sense of the world and the Church.

The unrest in the Church has pulled and pummeled me into wondering how can anybody know what is God's will. Who is right? Who is wrong? Am I blinded by my own notions of justice? The battleground of my Catholic imagination has given me an image I hold onto.

The Church is in travail and no matter who is right or wrong, a birth is trying to happen. What is important is that life be preserved. Those who are standing around wringing their hands saying, "This child should never have been conceived" and doing nothing to save the lives of both child and mother create their own impotence. I understand that I, as a conflicted Catholic, am called to act as midwife to this birth. A midwife does not worry about lineage or parental aspirations. The midwife takes all the knowledge and skills within to overcome obstacles and deliver the new life and preserve the life of the mother. The responsibility of the midwife is focused. It is non-judgmental. The midwife acts out of the belief that life is to be protected and entrusted to the future. To God.

A priest friend once told me we are only called to keep the light of faith burning in our own generation. That burden is light.

Candice Neenan, Tidewater college, VA
cneenan0@gmail.com
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10. Memories from rural life

One of the primary sources for my own religious imagination comes from my thirty years of rural life. Living among the goats, the fields, the cycles of winter and summer, abundance and lean times, the messages of scripture are played out before my very eyes. When one has made wine from one’s own grapes and cut down an apple tree that refuses to produce, scripture stories take on that much more meaning. To imagine life in those times is thus that much easier to do.

As a theologian and one who works in adult formation with parish people, I find one of my primary roles is to keep those sparks of religious imagination flaring in people’s lives. I thrill when I note that particular “look” that sometimes comes into their eyes while in the midst of a discussion about the faith, for it signals to me that that a mind is soaring. Little is more satisfying that to watch another make the connection between some scriptural or theological point and their own life. I’ve seen this occur during scripture study, group lectio divina, discussions on doctrine, and in conversations about books or church history, and as a result of contemplative prayer. All these can be invitations to allow the fire of the Spirit to enter more fully in, and to thus encounter Christ in a very personal manner. The result of that is always, ultimately, transformation.

Susan Sack, University of Dayton
ssack1@udayton.edu
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11. Imagination as hope

"The Church is in travail and no matter who is right or wrong, a birth is trying to happen." This line from Candace Neenan resonated. This week I heard from two women with almost the exact same story. The first woman's husband was in the hospital and she was thinking about him a lot and praying. She was wishing she had a memorized prayer that she could say, something like the Our Father and Hail Mary. She said that when she starts to say these familiar prayers, she has to stop because she has a new understanding of God, not as "our father," or that "he" is "in heaven." The other woman told of how she had witnessed a woman lying in the street.
The woman was being taken care of, but when my friend drove by, she wanted to say a prayer for her. There was the same reaction. She found that she could no longer say the memorized prayers that she was used to. I've heard other people say, too, that they can no longer say the creed at Mass because the language seems to make no sense. It surprises me to hear people talk like this. Even though I myself have felt this way too, I'm surprised to hear people with no formal theological background say the same thing.
How widespread is this phenomenon? What can anyone do about it?

Win Whelan, Emerita, St. Bonaventure University
wwhelan@sbu.edu
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12. In imagination “war has already been abolished”

In my graduate studies (late 60s) where Max Weber’s value-free sociology was royally regnant I was able to keep at least a little intellectually sane by reading 1959 C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. Without imagination, of course, Weber could not have even conceived of capitalism as requiring a vision of life and its meaning with roots in a Calvinist sense of the source of morality and salvation. Even though there has been some – a little – reflection in Catholic related sociology about imagination (think of Greeley especially) there has been (to my knowledge) very little challenging the sociological imagination to critical social judgment invited by an ever-deepening appropriation of the gospel and liturgical. But there are models. For me, Stanley Hauerwas is exemplary. Consider these points he’s made in his recent (and pertinent) War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (Grand Rapids Michigan, 2011) where he writes that for the Christian “war has already been abolished.” How’s that for a “counterfactual imaginative!” But it’s worth following his argument.

By “war being already abolished” he means that in terms of its eschatology our faith teaches us that Christ’s death has already inaugurated the reign of God. So the faith question is, How Christians can and should we live in a world of war as a people who believe that war has been abolished?

If we pay attention, and sociology is systematically paying attention, we can see how war becomes an American state-liturgy on Memorial Day, or when we hear the Gettysburg Address recited and reverence its 272 words as comprising a sacred national text, or when the American flag becomes an icon, or when we reverentially hush at sports events to hear the star spangled banner. Hauerwas’ war-as-liturgy point is that war is far more (less?) than reason or realpolitik: that the inevitability of war first exists in the collective imagination and without the counter liturgy that Christianity proclaims we cannot even imagine a world without war. The best the nation state imagination can offer is pauses (hopefully long) between inevitable wars.

Because of America’s self-evident sense of being the exceptional and the exemplary nation, and because of the evocative power of its subconscious liturgy of violence, Hauerwas fears that any American application of reason alone to the ongoing questions of national defense and security inevitably leads to a just war position which, as our history demonstrates, inexorably bends to the official inclinations and declamations of American political elites. Elite reason is narrowly instrumental. “Realists in the State Department and Pentagon,” he writes, “may have no illusions about why American self-interest requires that a war be fought, but Americans cannot fight a war as cynics…. (So) the rest of the nation justifies war, using categories that necessitate a ‘next war’.” And thus “When Christians no longer see the reality of the church as an alternative to the world’s reality, we abandon the world to war”. The only secure sustenance for nonviolence is a community tied together through liturgy and gospel stories that present Jesus as accepting suffering rather than seeking power over his enemies. “Don’t”, Hauerwas warns, try to “make peace some distant ideal rather than an eschatological reality. Only a consciously eschatological liturgy can subvert a subconscious national liturgy. War exists first in the imagination. Imagining a world without war is a requirement for authentic discipleship. Authentic discipleship is nonviolent.

I recommend Hauerwas to all those who aspire to a sociological imagination that radically engages our national collective imagination and its secular liturgies.

Jim Kelly, emeritus, Fordham University.
jkjrkelly@gmail.com
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13. An African woman’s religious imagination

When I think of religious imagination, I imagine my own existence. As an African woman whose world is permeated by the divine, life is religious and spiritual. I couldn’t imagine life otherwise. In this sense, God is my every thought and desire. The sacred and the profane intersect and interact in the depth of my existence. God is all in all. My imagination soars for the fullness of life for all, especially the deprived and the marginalized. My religious imagination embraces the God of abundant life. It yearns for life in all and for all.

I recently visited with six teenage schoolgirls whom I consider my daughters in the slums of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. While we walked on rugged and smelly paths and roads to visit their homes, I could only imagine that the God of abundant life would wish it were different for them. How could people live in such dehumanizing situation? I asked myself. Yet, deep down, there was a sense of hope as I imagined the God of life who would not be averse to pitching tent (incarnating) in the lives and locus of these girls.

My religious imagination is the desire for fullness of life and abundance of it for all creation. It is the recognition and celebration of life in all of the cosmos. It is like the story told of the 16th Century mystic Teresa of Avila, who was visited by Jesus with a question “Who are you?” and Teresa answered “I am Teresa of Jesus.” Not to be outdone, Teresa asked Jesus “Who are you?” and Jesus replied: “I am Jesus of Teresa.” My religious imagination quickens the participation of all as equal partners in the divine dance.

Anne Arabome, Duquesne University
omoye208@yahoo.co.uk
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14. Song as an expression of the religious imagination

One of the ways my religious imagination breaks through the monotony of life is through the surprising gift of song. Sixteen years ago today, on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, I shared the recorded version of a song I had written, called Forever a Family. Sixteen years later, the timing is still ripe for the formation of identity through faith, song and imagination. Here are those lyrics which still have a strong impact on me:

Forever a Family

Creation is groaning and cries for rebirth
A new world is blooming for all life on earth
The Spirit of Wisdom is hov’ring above
Bring your family together, unite us in love.

Refrain:
We’re forever a family, we’re born of God’s grace.
We join hands as children from each land and race.
We believe in God’s promise that all will be one.
We’re a family together united by love.

We sit at one table, we eat of one bread.
Our hope is in Jesus, by him we are fed.
We’ll dine at one banquet when day’s end has come
Knead your family together, unite us in love.
(Refrain)
We’re adopted and grafted into Jesus the vine.
As branches that bear fruit, we become God’s wine
That flows in abundance from a blessing cup:
Drink as family together united by love.
(Refrain)
We walk in the Kingdom, our lives are a sign
As sisters and brothers, God’s dream beyond time.
We honor each other as Jesus has done,
We’re a family together united by love.
(Refrain)
So let’s join together to give thanks and praise
The God of all loving through wonderful ways
Has made us a people where each one belongs
We’re a family forever, united by love.
(Refrain)

Dave Pipitone, Streamwood, IL
dave_pipitone@wowway.com
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15. Challenging our religious imagination

Anne Arabome's post reminded me of a challenge I am extending to myself. I believe that to truly be a good theologian I must allow life, in all of its complex and earthy reality, to challenge my dearly cherished, possibly antiquated, religious imagination.

As I recently listened to a pair of career master sergeants discuss their experiences in places like Afghanistan, experiences of seeing children die, for example, I realized that my nice neat categories of who God is or how God is present in our lives don't always fit.

So the challenge I am setting for myself as classes begin is just this: to invite those children of war to enter my classroom and sit among my students. I want them to challenge my religious imagination and allow the God I think I have come to understand be the God who is. And maybe in the process I can understand and engage my students in a whole new way.

Marti R. Jewell, University of Dallas
mjewell@udallas.edu
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16. The Shroud of Turin