A Journey In Imagination

A Journey In Imagination offers the hope of an alternative to a world convulsed by hostility and violence. Through an imaginative journey into Bible stories, incidents, and verses, the possibility of reversing hostility in both personal and communal life is explored. Biblical hospitality is neither a head in the sand nor a pie in the sky pleasantry. Instead it is the daring and challenging work of reversing hostility through seeing the 'other' fully as a human being. We may be failing at relationships, but that does not mean that we are doomed forever to fail. Too many of the tensions between the haves and the have-nots, between races, and between different religious traditions seem to have only two alternatives: violence and more violence. Life and relationships do not have to be this way. By exploring incidents that demonstrate alternatives to hostility, the book addresses this failure of imagination. This book is also a response to the accusation that the God of the Old Testament is little more than a God of vengeance and violence. To the contrary, the God of the Old Testament is the same God to whom Jesus prayed. Throughout the Bible, God yearns for a reversal of hostility.

“In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Changes in society, beginning in the 18th century and continuing into our own time, underlie the Romantic Movement. It starts as a reaction against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment, against the rigidity of social structures protecting privilege, and against the materialism of an age which, in the first stirring of the Industrial Revolution, already shows signs of making workers the slaves of machinery and of creating squalid urban environments.

The Enlightenment idea that reason creates fixed moral rules that specify "the right thing to do" is mistaken, according to Johnson, because it misses the ways in which human conceptual systems are grounded in bodily experience, and it ignores the expansive and constructive nature of our best moral thinking. Since new findings in cognitive science explain reasoning in terms of prototypes, frame semantics, metaphor, and basic-level experience, Johnson contends that we must revise our views of ethics and adopt an alternative conception of moral reflection - one that is thoroughly imaginative.

The imagination has long been associated with travel and tourism; from the seventeenth century when the showman and his peepshow box would take the village crowd to places, cities and lands through the power of stories, to today when we rely on a different range of boxes to whisk us away on our imaginative travels: the television, the cinema and the computer. Even simply the notion of travel, it would seem, gives us license to daydream. The imagination thus becomes a key concept that blurs the boundaries between our everyday lives and the idea of travel. Yet, despite what appears to be a close and comfortable link, there is an absence of scholarly material looking at travel and the imagination. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, cultural researchers, philosophers, anthropologists, visual researchers, archaeologists, heritage researchers, literary scholars and creative writers, this edited collection explores the socio-cultural phenomenon of imagination and travel. The volume reflects upon imagination in the context of many forms of physical and non-physical travel, inviting scholars to explore this fascinating, yet complex, area of inquiry in all of its wonderful colour, slipperiness, mystery and intrigue. The book intends to provide a catalyst for thinking, discussion, research and writing, with the vision of generating a cannon of scholarship on travel and the imagination that is currently absent from the literature.

From 1985 to 1995, the syndicated comic strip Calvin and Hobbes followed the antics of a precocious six-year-old boy and his sardonic stuffed tiger. At the height of its popularity, the strip ran in more than 2,400 newspapers and generated a fan base that continues to run in the millions. This critical analysis of Calvin and Hobbes explores Calvin's world and its deep reservoir of meanings. Close readings of individual strips highlight the profundity of Calvin's world with respect to a number of life's big questions, including the things that one values, friendship, God, death, and other struggles in life. By engaging with Calvin and Hobbes as more than "just" a comic strip, this work demonstrates how the imagination remains an invaluable resource for making sense of the world. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

As early as the 1850s, when Samuel L. Clemens (before he became Mark Twain), as a teenager, traveled from his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, to the east (Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and New York City) and south (St, Louis). In the 1860s, he traveled west to Nevada, California, and The Sandwich Islands (Hawai’I). He also traveled east to Europe and the Middle East. In between these early travels and his “around the world” lecture tour in the 1890s, he lived for periods of time in Europe. From these travels and sojourns abroad, Clemens often found that the imagined geography differed significantly from the reality. And, as most people know, he drew on his real and imagined “home” geography of the lower Mississippi River region to produce several works, including his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although much has been published about his travels, this collection of essays marks a different approach to Twain’s use of geography and geography’s influence on Twain. The eleven essays use Twain’s concepts of space (geography) to help us understand (or to complicate our understanding of) some of Twain’s works, including Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, No. 44 The Mysterious Stranger, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and “The Private History of Campaign that Failed.” The contributors include veteran Twain scholars as well as a graduate student and a non-academic humorist. Their critical perspectives range from the biographical and historical to Althusserian Ideological.

The region of Campania with its fertility and volcanic landscape exercised great influence over the Roman cultural imagination. A hub of activity outside the city of Rome, the Bay of Naples was a place of otium, leisure and quiet, repose and literary productivity, and yet also a place of danger: the looming Vesuvius inspired both fear and awe in the region's inhabitants, while the Phlegraean Fields evoked the story of the gigantomachy and sulphurous lakes invited entry to the Underworld. For Flavian writers in particular, Campania became a locus for literary activity and geographical disaster when in 79 CE, the eruption of the volcano annihilated a great expanse of the region, burying under a mass of ash and lava the surrounding cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae. In the aftermath of such tragedy the writers examined in this volume - Martial, Silius Italicus, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus - continued to live, work, and write about Campania, which emerges from their work as an alluring region held in the balance of luxury and peril.

Imagination and Arts-Based Practices for Integration in Research explores the philosophical assumptions, defining concepts, and methodological issues related to the introduction of intentional imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into some or all phases of investigation, and data integration of particular research approaches. Although typically central to mixed, multi-method, and arts-based research, the practice of integrating diverse forms of data might be applied to other research traditions. The integration of data diversity represents a deviation from traditional scientific thinking demanding a dramatic paradigm shift inclusive of multi-dimensional, nondiscursive, aesthetic, rhizomatic, and imaginative mental processes. In this book, imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices are described and illustrated as approaches to investigating, revealing, and understanding the elusive yet essential meanings hidden in the crevices, shadows, and liminal spaces in between diverse data sets leading to integration, illumination, and synthesis. The book will appeal to arts-based, mixed methods, and adventurous researchers. It walks the reader through the revisionist philosophical assumptions and offers aligned methodological suggestions to the induction of imaginative mental processes and arts-based practices into research.