James K.A. Smith Reimagines “Imagination”

dukegcf2 — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:15:39 +0000

On March 5, 2013, James K. A. Smith, Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview at Calvin College, delivered his talk entitled “Beyond ‘Creativity’: Expanding the Intersection of Theology and the Imagination.” This was part of the Distinguished Lecture Series held by Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts (DITA).

Rather than something that is exclusive to artists, Smith proposes to think about imagination as a meaning-making that is possessed by all and thus attemps to “unhook” the use of the creative language and imagination from subjective expressionism. According to Smith, imagination is a “quasi-faculty” akin to the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s praktognosia (know-how). Fundamentally aesthetic in nature, this know-how is understood by Smith to be a precognitive perception, an everyday capacity for understanding the world.

It is with imagination that one can see the artistic truth, or the truth of the aesthetic experience. The appreciation of form, as opposed to mere content, as truth is found in formalism. Given their particular structural composition, Smith asserts that narratives, metaphors and liturgies are unique modes of truth. Using the example of a clip from Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Smith points out Anderson’s frequent symmetrical frames and extended level shots as sites where artistic truth resides in the form.

3/1/2013 large group recap

dukegcf2 — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 06:30:18 +0000

Professor Greg Wray spoke candidly about the challenges he’s faced as a Christian biologist, given that Christianity and human evolutionary biology are often perceived to be diametrically opposed. The first challenge is a social one, which stems from the assumption that Christians do not have as rigorous of an intellectual pursuit. The second challenge he named was one of historicity, notably questions that arise from a reading of Genesis.* Wray then opened up the discussion to questions from the audience. Some of the issues brought up included where imago dei (the image of God) fitted in with evolution, the probability of life outside of our planet, and the occurrence of miracles in view of stochasticism.

* A resource that Wray mentioned was Genesis One by Hugh Ross, which, among other things, sheds light on the particular use of “created” in that first chapter of the biblical book. Rather than a creation of something out of nothing, certain instances where “created” was used convey more the sense of “established.”

Graduate Christian Fellowship at Duke

James K.A. Smith Reimagines “Imagination”

3/1/2013 large group recap