Imagination Of The Heart

This guide to contemporary preaching focuses on exciting and innovative ideas that have recently emerged in the work of Fred Craddock and others. Much more than just another "how-to" book, the volume is informed by substantial work in contemporary theology, linguistics, and hermeneutical theory. At the same time, the book is very practical, and addresses basic principles of preaching. Paul Scott Wilson demonstrates with clarity and in detail how Scripture and personal experience can be used to train the imagination, and how this, in turn, can both strengthen and enliven the task of preaching. Book jacket.

The volume explores in depth the vast healing potential of a fundamental human gift. In addition to providing a historical perspective of the importance accorded to imagination in the disease and healing processes, the book furnishes theoretical, empirical, and clinical evidence of the efficacy of imagery in the healing of a wide variety of health problems including stress, pain, cancer, depression, phobias, skin disorders, and sexual dysfunctions.

Kate Bruce argues that imagination can help to engage the hearer in a sermon which seeks to evoke rather than to inform. Imagination frames how we see the world and ourselves in it. As such it has a vital role in how preachers see the preaching task itself, which in turn affects how we go about the task.

This book investigates the concept and practises of imaginative teaching. Since Rudolf Steiner (founder of the Waldorf schools) wrote extensively on the subject and is renowned for his contributions to education, his work is used to develop insights into the nature of 'imaginative teaching'. Given the societal changes since Steiner's time, however, the topic is further developed by examining imaginative teaching in three Steiner primary classrooms, using the methodological means of ethnography and phenomenology. The insights gained from this undertaking are used to re-theorise aspects of Steiner's writings about imagination and holistic education. In this study it is argued that imaginative teaching is made up of three modes of pedagogy and seven teaching methods, and that these modes and methods form a most potent means for connecting children with aesthetic, intellectual and physical development.

For John Henry Newman, religion is animated by an imaginative 'master vision' which 'supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace'. All his life, Newman reflected on this 'master vision'. His reflections on the moral imagination developed out of his understanding of practical wisdom, as characterized by Aristotle – the wisdom that 'the good man' has in living a good life. For Newman, the vision at the core of religion completes and perfects the intuitions of the conscience. John Henry Newman and the Imagination looks at how Newman's understanding of the moral and visionary imagination developed over the course of his life; and it relates his ideas about the imagination to his portrayals of religious experience, and vision, in his novels and poetry.