Imagination Redeemed

In this episode, Brian, Sarah, and Christina explore the profound impact of stories on our lives and faith. They discuss how narratives—through books, movies, music, and art—profoundly influence our worldviews, emotional health, and even brain development. Dive with us into the magic of storytelling, the healing power of positive narratives, and the importance of integrating personal stories into a larger divine narrative.

Support the show: https://www.anselmsociety.org/podcast25.

In our last episode, Chase Whitney talked about the role of tears in relation to joy, and how that is laid out in Scripture. But the night before Chase gave that talk, he was in the audience at an Anselm Society pub night listening to Michael Ward give the following one—and he joked with me afterward that Michael must have been reading his notes. A day later, after I'd heard the sermon, I understood why.

Michael's talk, in this episode, deals with much the same topic—but this time, using various writings of C.S. Lewis as literary illumination to help us understand joy and tears even more deeply.

In case you're unfamiliar with Michael, I'll tell you he is a literary scholar and theologian, renowned for his work on C.S. Lewis. Ward is best known for his book Planet Narnia, where he argues that C.S. Lewis structured The Chronicles of Narnia to reflect the imagery of the seven heavens. I highly commend that book to your attention if you think Narnia is only for children.

Support the podcast! https://anselmsociety.org/podcast25

We're still on hiatus as we work to plan a re-launch in a few months, and we look forward to telling you more about that soon. But in the meantime, we have two bonus episodes to share with you. These are two talks that happened within 24 hours of each other at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Colorado Springs—and in fact, the teacher for this one was sitting in the audience for the other one, which we'll share next week.

Both talks deal with the relationship of tears and grief to joy and our relationship with God. In this first talk, a Sunday sermon on September 15 2024, church planter Chase Whitney emphasizes the significance of tears as a uniquely human experience, and discusses how joy and tears can make room for each other as we seek God in our lives. It's a beautiful exploration of how grief can bring us closer to Him.

Support the podcast: https://www.anselmsociety.org/podcast25

Months of planning and prep are almost finished, and in January, with your help, the first episodes of the NEW Imagination Redeemed podcast will drop. 

It will be a feast: retellings of the great stories, and warm conversations on how to enter into the life of the Christian imagination.

But to do it right, we need two things from you!

Listen for more details on the new (and old) hosts, the updates to the format, and how you can help.

Brian joins Michael Minkoff of Renew the Arts for a conversation about how imagination and art empower us to live like people of heaven. They also talk about Taylor Swift. Yes, you read that correctly.

Learn more about Renew the Arts at https://renewthearts.org/.

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.