Imagination Redeemed

Listen to Brian Brown's talk from the 2024 Square Halo "Return to Narnia" conference.

Maybe you've absorbed the fake C.S. Lewis quote that you ARE a soul and you HAVE a body. Or maybe you grew up in an environment that only valued time if it was spent getting people into the elevator going up.

If so, you probably struggle to live in the world as you ought, because you have no theological or mental category for most things between idolatry and indifference. So you can’t find a place for many of the things you love most in the kingdom of God.

We have to fix our relationship with material reality. In the Chronicles, Lewis gives us a fictional world that very clearly has meaning and magic woven into every layer of it. The reason that appeals to us is that it is a reflection of our world as we’re supposed to see it, even if we’ve forgotten.

In this talk, Brian offers a threefold way of relating to material reality--and our vocations in it--that explains why you love the things you do, and what to do with them.

A friendly podcast interviews Brian about our new book, "Why We Create."

More about Upstream.

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.

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.

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.

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 naming).

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.

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.

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.

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.