Apologetics and the Christian Imagination Quotes

“The problem is that, all too often, people think they already know what Christianity is—and they don’t particularly want to hear any more about it. Many people have only a vague idea of Jesus, one that’s frankly not interesting enough to be worth bothering about; for them, Christianity is just one more option on the spiritual menu, and an outdated one at that.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“The very fact that we protest evil means that we recognize the reality and ultimate priority of goodness.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“As Tolkien points out, it is familiar faces that are “most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces. . . . We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“As Lewis says in An Experiment in Criticism: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“A story that conveys truth and beauty will show more of its truth and beauty each time the reader comes to it, and in a different way, because the reader will be different, coming to the text with new experiences, different moods, different questions.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“The direct use of literature, drama, and film, through shared reading, performing, or viewing (and subsequent discussion), is one way to incorporate narrative into apologetics, but there are other ways to make use of it as well.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Literature offers a mode of apologetics in which we can guide the natural human emotional response toward its right end, by presenting truth in such a way that we are moved on the level of our emotions as well as convinced on the level of our intellect.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“One of the characteristics that makes literature incarnational is that it has the power to evoke emotion in the reader.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“We are not just souls that happen to have bodies; we are embodied souls, or ensouled bodies.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“That the Word became flesh has implications for all aspects of life, including our self-understanding, our relationships with others, and how we relate to the created world. The Christian hope is for a renewal of all Creation; the future we anticipate is not a disembodied spirit-heaven, but rather “a new heaven and a new earth.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“THE Incarnation of Christ is at the heart of our Christian faith. Every other doctrine depends on this: that Jesus of Nazareth is fully God and fully man.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“A SUDDEN GOLDFINCH The branch is bare and black against the fog; Cold droplets bead along the twigs, and fall. The hours are passing, ready to be gone, And now they’re past, dissolved, beyond recall, Beyond my reach. A sudden goldfinch clings And bends the twig so slightly with its weight It seems as if it’s painted on: its wings  In motion are a glimpse of summer, bright, Quick, and now already gone. This moment, So brief but still so clear against the blur Of unattended time, in memory Connects the things that are, the things that were. Fleeting as it is, almost a ghost, It may be time is never truly lost.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“To say “God, the Holy Trinity, exists” is a different kind of claim than saying “Winston Churchill existed.” We are making a claim about the nature of reality, not about one more object that is included in the cosmos.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Good stories and poetry help us to see more clearly when we close the book and re-enter ordinary life.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“We live in a culture that is paradoxically both jaded by and ignorant about Christianity.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Through the God-given faculty of imagination, we can enter into other perspectives, and through the faculty of reason, we can assess the truth or falsity of what we discover.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“possible is itself a perspective, one that denies the incarnational reality of ourselves as human beings (body and soul) who have a lived history that actually matters.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Understanding is more than knowing facts; it requires putting those facts together and grasping their meaning”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Language-policing is a move to avoid discussion or exploration of the truth or falsity of words that a group or individual doesn’t like. It is often manipulative, and is a clever and unfortunately highly effective strategy to avoid having to make a counter-argument.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Once language becomes routinely distorted, it becomes increasingly easy to justify and promote evil”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“To raise an issue for discussion and argument means at least tacitly accepting that you might not be able to convince the other side that you’re right . . . and having to live with that. The alternative to authentic discussion is to manipulate circumstances such that the debate never happens, and the position that you favor becomes entrenched—or to manipulate language so that the other point of view becomes unsayable and eventually unthinkable.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Materialism has so thoroughly invaded our culture that the fate of one’s eternal soul is no longer a pressing issue for most non-believers.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“A brief survey of Mere Christianity supplies the following list: becoming a Christian (passing over from life to death) is like joining a campaign of sabotage, like falling at someone’s feet or putting yourself in someone’s hands, like taking on board fuel or food, like laying down your rebel arms and surrendering, saying sorry, laying yourself open, turning full speed astern; it is like killing part of yourself, like learning to walk or to write, like buying God a present with his own money; it is like a drowning man clutching at a rescuer’s hand, like a tin soldier or a statue coming alive, like waking after a long sleep, like getting close to someone or becoming infected, like dressing up or pretending or playing; it is like emerging from the womb or hatching from an egg; it is like a compass needle swinging to north, or a cottage being made into a palace, or a field being plowed and resown, or a horse turning into a Pegasus, or a greenhouse roof becoming bright in the sunlight; it is like coming around from anesthetic, like coming in out of the wind, like going home.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Metaphors are valuable because they build a bridge between the known and the unknown. Or, to put it another way, metaphors serve the same purpose as propositional statements: to orient the reader toward reality.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“Metaphor is a literary device, just like rhyme is a literary device; as such, it is a means of expressing ideas that may be true or false, effective or ineffective, compelling or boring.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“The beauty of figurative language, used well, is that it can communicate truth both directly and intuitively, by its fittingness of image and meaning, even if the reader doesn’t consciously understand it.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“It’s the difference between expressing poverty with “I have only ten dollars in my checking account” (literal, direct) and “I’m as poor as a church mouse” (figurative, indirect); hunger with “I’m very hungry” (literal) and “I could eat a horse” (figurative); or admiration with “She is young and beautiful” (literal) and “My love is like a red, red rose / that’s newly sprung in June” (figurative).”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“figurative language is one of the primary modes by which, past and present, the Church communicates truth to her people, in Scripture, Christian art, and the liturgy.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“IMAGINATIVE literature is a particularly valuable means of creating meaning for ideas, as well as for conveying these ideas to people who would be resistant to them if presented as arguments.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith

“In the richness of language, we find not a problem, but an opportunity for creating meaning, because God has so made us that we can continue to create imaginative literature to body forth meaning in words.”
― Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith