Today, TGC carries my review of Gene Veith and Matthew Ristuccia’s book Imagination Redeemed. I loved the book:

Imagination was given to us so we could love each other. Imagination Redeemed showed me something I had never realized: practically every aspect of neighbor love involves imagination. We cannot do to others what we would have them do to us without first imagining what we would have them do to us. Or if we wish to obey God’s command to respect the “image of God” in all human beings, we must have a well-developed and disciplined power of grasping images. What is that but imagination? Paul commands us to bear one another’s burdens and consider the interests of others; how do we know what others’ burdens and interests are, except by using imagination to place ourselves in their shoes?

I did register one objection:

In several places, they talk as though imagination were not just coordinate with reason and will, but superior to them…If reason is subordinate to imagination rather than coordinate with it, there can be no valid reason to insist it’s right to follow a vision of the true God and wrong to follow a vision of false gods, or none. Veith and Ristuccia back up their claim by pointing out that companies spend millions on advertising that appeals to the imagination, but those same companies also spend millions on lawyers, lobbyists, spokespeople, and others whose job is to appeal to reason. We don’t want to jump out of the frying pan of Cartesian rationalism into the fire of Nietzschean relativism.

But that’s a minor flaw. It’s a wonderful little book. Check it out.