Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation

This book restores the imagination to its central role in spiritual formation by recovering key works from the Christian tradition, enabling us to experience the formative power of the imagination for ourselves. It also revives "the art of fashioning the soul" as an essential aspect of Christian spiritual formation and character development.

Award-winning professor and scholar Lanta Davis explains that many of the problems at the heart of the Christian church today--such as nationalism, consumerism, and partisan politics--stem from a crisis of the imagination. She encourages us to reorient our gaze from diseased cultural imaginations and fix our eyes instead on works from the historic Christian imaginative tradition that better reflect the love, joy, and wonder of the gospel. Each chapter introduces a different work of the Christian imagination: icons, sacred architecture, imaginative prayer, bestiaries, and personifications of the virtues and vices. An insert features numerous full-color images.