Allan Gurganus:

It takes one durable person to believe that fantasy is as potent as reality. Seeing too far into others’ lives can make you cynical. Novelists face danger, spending their lives imagining adult temptation and corruptibility. Holding on to the great “What if?” requires a willingness to live wide-eyed. A readiness—­even an eagerness—to go on being surprised. When I’m writing from a child’s point of view, I sometimes find it helpful to literally get down on my knees and walk around the house. I’m once again a creature four feet tall. You can see the undersides of tables. Electrical outlets near the baseboards become fascinating again.

“What is the purpose of interreligious dialogue?” asks Abraham Joshua Heschel:

It is neither to flatter nor to refute one another, but to help one another, to share insight and learning, to cooperate in academic ventures on the highest scholarly level and, what is even more important, to search in the wilderness for wellsprings of devotion, for treasures of stillness, for the power of love and care for man. What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a resurrection of sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive the divine sparks in our souls; to nurture openness to the spirit of the Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and faithfulness to the Living God.

Sara Hendren:

If a loud restaurant overwhelms you, the sound of pots and pans crashing send you into a rage, or you find a roller coaster at breakneck speed to be oddly relaxing, then perhaps you recognize yourself on some spectrum or another. The sensory world is a weird mix of human bodies, each of us moving around in a singular flesh envelope. We traverse the rooms and streets we like and we hate, turning the little knobs of the world’s sensation by our choices of what to wear, how to walk, what to include and what to shut out. Augmented by headphones or a hat pulled low, decked in seamless socks or technical Lycra or fuzzy sheepskin, wrapped tightly or loosely, rocking or fidgeting or chewing our nails—each body makes a stream of conscious and unconscious choices, knitting together a habitable personal universe minute by minute by minute by minute. When I see Stephen mapping the world in lines, breaking its space to tame it, all I can think is how perceptively he’s externalized an invisible but fundamentally human need: to build bridges that temporarily edit the shapes, or sounds, or sights of the world. And I wonder: Who else is looking for lines, a little lost in space? Who else is seeking a way?

From 99% Invisible, Interstellar Illusions: “Greebles” Lend Large Sci-Fi Structures a Sense of Scale:

In the world of physical modeling, creating variations to make things look big can be as simple as gluing small pieces onto models and allowing these accretions to suggest immense structures. […]

One pending suggestion for a dictionary definition of greebles shows that the term’s use has broadened over time, too, including any “cosmetic detailing added to the surface of a larger object that makes it appear more complex or technologically advanced on film sets and on toys to make them appear more realistic and hand tools to give the impression of higher quality.”

Not to hijack the point, but there has to be a corresponding effect for almost all political discussions, especially the ones on TV.

James K.A. Smith at Image:

And how do you teach a body? Through embodiment. This is why the formation of the imagination is fundamentally incarnate. The way to the imagination is through the body, which is why embodied, material media captivate and shape it. Philosopher Charles Taylor talks about what he calls our collective “social imaginary”: “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings” before they ever think about it, the way we perceive others and our collective life in an instant. Our “take” on others. Importantly, Taylor points out that our social imaginary is “not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends.” In other words, the social imaginary is shaped by the ways artists show us the world: our storytellers, image-makers, and performers of all kinds enact a story about who we are.

This, of course, is also where we go wrong. Our imaginations are susceptible to malformation depending on what images we feed them, what stories they soak up. It’s the imagination—well- or malformed—that determines what I see before I look. . . .

To change our world means telling a different story, inhabiting a different story, transforming my habits of perception to change what I see before I even look. “But this story,” Stevenson concluded, “requires a different symbolic landscape.” Arguments made in a courtroom are important; they might change minds and laws. But it is this sculpture, this memorial, that seeps down to the imagination. The soul that descends into this work of art can never see the world the same way again.

Denys Turner at Commonweal:

It is true that [in her Long Text] the Lord rebukes Julian for her anxieties about sin, but what she thereupon corrects herself for having thought is not that God could have created a world of free human agents who did not sin. Instead, she corrects herself for assuming that all would have been well only in such a sinless world. Her inclinations on that subject, until corrected by the Lord, were the same as Hume’s. They were also the same as those of the biblical Job. What the Lord tells her is that all is well in just this sinful world, and that puzzles her all the more. . . .

It is the “not yet” that matters here, the provisional. What is provisional is Julian’s theological refusal of both the logical completeness of Plantinga, which would purport to demonstrate the formal consistency of an infinite love’s creating just this sinful world, and the narrative completeness claimed by Milton, which would purport to finish the story that “justifies the wayes of God to men.” For all her doubts about how it could be true, Julian accepts that “sin is behovely.” But I think she knows enough about how the logic of the behovely works—as narratives do—to understand that we could see how sin is behovely only if we were in possession of the complete narrative that makes sense of it, and we are not. All we possess is but a narrative fragment, a torn-off corner of the manuscript of salvation history, and it tells Julian of nothing but the paradox of an innocent man judicially executed for a reason he too begs to know of, though he dies, as we will, the reason why denied us all. Somehow, Julian knows that the meaning of sin, its character as behovely, lies in that incomplete narrative of the Cross that is at the heart of her showings, a narrative whose incompleteness is necessary, for “not yet” belongs to the nature of human existence in time. . . .

In the meantime, there is but the meantime, the “not yet.” And Julian does her theology obedient to the temporality in which neither understanding nor living can yet be “completed.” Julian is the theologian she is because she knows that all theological writing submits to a necessary condition of incompleteness, and like Hume she refuses an easygoing and peremptory ultimacy. For writing that is pretentiously “finished” is not theological; it is parody.

G.C. Waldrep:

As with O’Connor, I had to think and write circumspectly around Faulkner, because he loomed so oppressively large in my consciousness. Some great writers are permissioning—that is, the more time you spend with them, the more permitted you feel to speak, to respond, to participate. But other great writers, whom one can read and return to with just as much or even greater pleasure, have the opposite effect. When I read Faulkner I find myself slipping into Faulknerian pastiche in my own writing and then going silent. So I must ration my reconnaissances.

I think the real legacy Faulkner left with me, which I dimly apprehended even before I wrote poetry, was mystagogy, that leading through mystery and revelation. Not an explanation—and therefore an exorcism or dispelling—of mystery and revelation: rather a leading-through. Faulkner performed that for me, at the time, in terms of a shared southern past, in ways no other writer did or could.

Julian Barnes, on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through a city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. . . . Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginnings of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.

Michael Oakeshott:

Philosophy in general knows two styles, the contemplative and the didactic, although there are many writers to whom neither belongs to the complete exclusion of the other. Those who practice the first let us into the secret workings of their minds and are less careful to send us away with a precisely formulated doctrine. Philosophy for them is a conversation, and, whether or not they write it as a dialogue, their style reflects their conception. Hobbes’s way of writing is an example of the second style. What he says is already entirely freed from the doubts and hesitancies of the process of thought. It is only a residue, a distillate that is offered to the reader. The defect of such a style is that the reader must either accept or reject; if it inspires to fresh thought, it does so only by opposition. And Hobbes’s style is imaginative, not merely on account of the subtle imagery that fills his pages, nor only because it requires imagination to make a system. His imagination appears also as the power to create a myth.

Gilbert Meilaender:

My impression is that most people would probably consider [C.S.] Lewis’ theological works to belong to the didactic rather than the contemplative style. Yet, in the course of studying his thought I have come to believe that this is far from true. If his fiction can be didactic as well as imaginative, his “standard” theology does far more than argue for certain propositions believed to be true. He is serious of course; for he has read his Plato well and knows that discussion of how a man ought to live is not trivial subject. And, indeed, he strives to present his theology consistently. But it is, he thinks, a consistent picture of an untidy world. The world as Lewis experiences it resists systematization—which is what we should expect from one who knows himself to be a pilgrim. (emphasis added)