The philosopher and educator Maxine Greene, in her (1995) book Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, wrote that “the role of imagination is not to resolve, not to point the way, not to improve. It is to awaken, to disclose the ordinarily unseen, unheard, and unexpected” (28). Greene went on to say that while educators often consider the importance of imagination in the lives of students, imagination is also essential for teachers because with it comes empathy. Imagination “feeds one's capacity to feel one's way into another vantage point” (36–37), to cross static boundaries and be addressed by the life-worlds of others. Such empathy becomes a requisite part of education in contexts ever more diverse, and a world ever more complex, in which the ability to join with others depends on empathic regard for those whose viewpoints or life situations may be quite different from one's own.
Although Greene was not writing about religious education per se, I have always heard her words about imagination and empathy in education through the lenses of religion and theology, to be about the awakening and disclosure of hope in situations of concrete particularity where meaning is reduced to the limits of what we already see, hear, and expect. To be hopeful in a world where wholeness, community, and peace for persons and groups so often remain “unseen, unheard, and unexpected” requires an imaginative capacity to transcend the possible and the already-known. Religious imagination draws on the symbolic, metaphorical, and storied resources of particular religious traditions to give shape to what hope might look like even in such a world as ours. As religious educator Maria Harris put it so well nearly three decades ago, “A profound vocation, the vocation to teaching; a profound vocation, the vocation to religious imagination. For it can lead to incarnation, to revelation, and to the grace of power. And these, in turn, can lead to the re-creation of the world” (1987, 181). With Harris and Greene, I too view imagination as central to teaching and learning, as well as to the work of constructing communities of memory, possibility, and transformation that lies at the heart of so much of religious life and religious education.
Last November (2015) the REA convened in Atlanta for its annual meeting, gathering around the theme of imagination. REA President Harold (Bud) Horell invited us to consider imagination's centrality not only to religious education as a practice and an academic field, but also to the shaping of the organization we know as REA:APPRRE. In his presidential address, which leads off this issue of Religious Education, Horell looks at imagination as part of the “founding DNA” of the REA. He contends that attention to this organization's imagination offers a way to better understand its development from 1903 to the present, and also a way to better understand some of the challenges faced by religious education today. Horell's presidential address is followed by the address of plenary speaker Dr. Emilie M. Townes, “Teaching and the Imagination,” in which she explores her experience of growing up through “an organic education that was practiced by loving and caring people who were far from perfect but were relentless in passing along their care and they taught my playmates and me that we must do likewise with others” (p. 368). In this education, Townes says, she was taught to dream, a way of using imagination. She also came to know the power of counter-memory, “imagination that liberates and educates for transformation,” in the face of the indignities of racism. Townes says that counter-memory in teaching “encourages us to craft expansive pedagogies in the teaching and learning lives we embody rather than metaphorically dragging students out of their chairs and across a wasteland of ideas that maim more than educate,” and that “this kind of imagination in teaching is shaped by integrity, vision, courage, and passion” (p 369–370).
Each year following the conference, those presenting papers receive the invitation to revise their work in light of new ideas and feedback from the discussions taking place at the meeting. A committee reviews all of the papers and selects a few out of the many good papers for publication in the journal's fourth issue of the volume year. This year's “conference issue” includes five such papers. John Falcone engages the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce as a resource to help Christians “better participate in God's imagination.” Courtney Goto offers a fresh take on clowning as a critical pedagogy that can “evoke and tutor prophetic imagination,” not only with words but also through embodiment. Annie Lockhart-Gilroy addresses the situation of Black working-class and poor girls for whom the nurture of theological imagination, or “a journey one goes through with God with the belief that things can be different and limitless,” can combat hopelessness. Robert O’Gorman, looking at imagination as the human ability to encounter the Divine, writes about sacraments as “a language of transcendence.” Kieran Scott engages the metaphor of “alternating currents” to consider the relationship between two seemingly divergent forms of religious imagination, the sacramental and the prophetic.
A book review by Darren Cronshaw concludes this conference issue. I hope this issue invites you to broader and deeper understandings of the place of imagination in religious education.
Joyce Ann Mercer, Editor
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