“I do take the imagination very seriously, and we’ve been taught very carefully in our schools to see without imagination. Bisection, analysis, taking apart is a way of seeing without imagination. So you don’t see things whole. You see them in their material disassemblement. The power of the imagination is to see things whole, see them clearly.
To see them whole, moreover, is to see them in their sanctity, which they have if they are part of the creation. But also, maybe to see them with love. The older I have gotten and the more experienced, the more I have noticed things, and the closer love and know have come in my understanding. They are not exactly synonyms, but the idea that you can know a thing without loving it seems to me more and more preposterous. The imagination shows us things in their inherent radiance as loved or loveable, and that to me is supremely important; but we’ve got to have a different curriculum if we’re going to encourage young people to have that kind of vision. […]”
I believe it is more than a curriculum in our schools but also a curriculum from our church pulpits and around our dinner tables and ultimately in our lived experience in our particular places.