The Evangelical Imagination Quotes

“For Hardy and other critics of the evangelical movement, too often the desire for purity encouraged hypocrisy, earnest ideals became mere performance, and the valuation of hard work turned into pursuit of material prosperity.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, Library Edition

“It is always tempting, and sometimes helpful, to see the world and to interpret stories, whether the true ones of history, or the Bible, or the fictional ones in novels and films, along broad sweeps and grand archetypes: Good vs. evil; cowboy with the white hat vs. cowboy with the black hat; angel vs. demon. Myth, symbol, and archetypes, along with dreams and visions, are universal signs of the timeless and eternal aspects of reality. They point to a divine order of Creation, and remind us that we are made in the Image of the Creator. The mythopoeic externalizes the truths of the inner spiritual life, making them manifest. Such stories meet a hunger caused by the general absence of myth and mystery in the modern world—that much-discussed disenchantment. (Chapter 11)”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“Today’s fantasy, not only literature, but films, games, cosplay, and even the growing popularity of Halloween celebrations, reflects an awareness that we live in a disenchanted world, as well as our desire to return to that sense of transcendence in the eminent: A lion, a ring, and Sauron, are symbols writ large. They are billboards on the highway of a disenchanted world, pointing us with bold letters and bright lights, to the forgotten places on the side roads of the modern soul. (Chapter 11)”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“Fantasy is kind of like training wheels for a people who have labored too long under an impoverished social imaginary. As Flannery O’Connor puts it, to the hard of hearing you shout; for the almost blind you draw large and startling pictures. (Chapter 11)”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“The novel [Pamela] is also a very powerful early expression of the modern self, one who sees her soul as equal in human worth and dignity to anyone, regardless of social class or power--and this, too, is part of evangelicalism.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis