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.

Christ's incarnation is the spark of Christian creativity. Poet, rock musician, and priest Malcolm Guite joins the show to make the case for this, journeying through Shakespeare and the Gospel of John. He also tells us why he loves the Anselm Society's name.

Why did God make us? What do our personal journeys represent in the grand scale of things? Is it really true that things like feasting and creating are acts of war against the Enemy that besets us? In this episode, Brian kicks off this month's theme of "Imago Dei" by sharing Peter Leithart's essay Creators Imaging the Creator, which explores the hinge question of our "Why We Create" series: what does it mean to be human?

What is the role of gratitude in figuring out what to do with the time that is given to us? Can we pay attention to what God is doing, in both the monotonous seasons of life, as well as in the middle of life's hardest plot twists? What does the ideal of gratitude look like fleshed out in the nitty gritty? Brian welcomes back writer and storyteller Leslie Bustard to talk about how to cultivate thankfulness, and how it helps us to live well in the present moment. Leslie shares her real life experience in regards to gratitude, and shares a secret: life doesn't have to be ordinary. 

Bonus episode! After the conversation with Corey about how Bergson's theory of time influenced the literature of Lewis and Eliot, Jane and Corey take us into T.S. Eliot's poem The Four Quartets to show us an example of these ideas in the text. 

Did you know that both C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot wrote about Time? About how the present moment is the means by which we touch eternity? Join Brian, Jane, and special guest Corey Latta as they dig deeper into the philosophies that influenced Lewis and Eliot's theology of time, and consequently some of their most famous works like The Screwtape Letters and The Four Quartets. When you understand that your only point of connection with eternity is the present moment, it changes your relationship with your past, your future, and with yourself.

Time is one of those things that's bigger on the inside, and the science of Time gets complex fast. But a good story about Time? A story can push you outside your assumptions and broaden your imagination without giving you a headache. Join Brian in a conversation with Ned Bustard about time travel, Doctor Who, and the big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.

What if time is more than the passing of moments? What if it’s a gift to help us find meaning? And what if the Christian life–in which death itself starts working backwards–can change our experience of past, present, and future? Grief and joy? Memory and expectation? In this episode, Jane reads to us her essay on the gift of time - a gift we will explore further at the Imagination Redeemed 2022 conference in September.

The ascension of Christ at the end of the Gospels leaves Christians with a paradox: how do we sing of redemption and joy, and in the same breath lament evil and suffering and pray "how long, O Lord?" In this bonus episode, Pastor Chris Stroup of Anselm's founding church uses the Ascension to show how we, who have had eternity opened to us, should approach the realities of living in a time-bound world that still wrestles with evil.