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

by Lanta Davis

Publisher:

Baker Academic

, 2024

Overview

This book restores the imagination to its central role in spiritual formation by recovering key works from the Christian tradition so readers can experience the formative power of the imagination for themselves.

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.

Key Features

• Restores the imagination to its central role in spiritual formation
• Explores icons, sacred architecture, imaginative prayer, bestiaries, and personifications of the virtues and vices
• Explains that many of the problems at the heart of the Christian church today stem from a crisis of the imagination

Product Details

• Title: Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation
• Author: Lanta Davis
• Edition: First Edition
• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Pages: 240
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subject: Spiritual formation
• ISBNs: 9781493444199, 9781493444205, 9781540966186, 1493444190, 1493444204, 1540966186
• Resource ID: LLS:BCMNGBHLDNFRMTN
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-07-02T19:19:22Z

About Lanta Davis

Lanta Davis (PhD, Baylor University) is associate professor of humanities and literature in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana. She was named the IWU Outstanding Scholar of the Year for 2020 and was a Fulbright Scholar at Queen's University, Belfast. Her work on the Christian imagination and formation has appeared in the Christian Century and Christ and Pop Culture.