Imagination Redeemed

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/. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

A friendly podcast interviews Brian about our new book, "Why We Create." More about Upstream. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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). --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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? --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support

The world around us deserves our awe and wonder, but we can make the error of believing the good things of this world are the best we can have - we can idolize the creation and forget the Creator. On the other hand, if we believe that because this world is secondary to the next then all of our earthly endeavors are meaningless, we can be indifferent to God's works. Is there a third way? In this episode, Brian shares Hans Boersma's essay on "How to Look for Heaven in Earth," and how living in the created order can ready us to better know the Creator Himself.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/imaginationredeemed/support