Spiritual Formation through Our Imaginations with Lanta Davis and Jessica Hooten Wilson
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Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
In this Trinity Forum Conversation, special guest host Jessica Hooten Wilson, along with author Lanta Davis, delve into the power of imagination and its role in spiritual formation. The discussion centers on Davis’s book ‘Becoming by Beholding,’ which explores Christian imagination through art, literature, and historical practices such as icons and the medieval bestiaries. These friends and scholars discuss the transformative potential of engaging with sacred art, the virtues, and traditional practices like Lectio Divina:
“In Jesus’s parables, I really appreciate that. He’s constantly showing us that there’s more hidden behind the surface than we think. The mustard seed is not just a mustard seed.
Yeast is not just yeast. So they’re ordinary things, but they have, I think Jesus shows us heavenly meanings. And I really think that this is what the incarnation helps us understand, that the divine is not just up above. It’s all around us. It’s here and now. That when God became matter, all the material world changed because of it.” – Lanta Davis
We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation. If this work resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org.
This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation recorded in March, 2025. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.
Learn more about Lanta Davis and Jessica Hooten Wilson.
Podcast Pairing
Listen to the episode with a refreshing recipe handpicked by our staff.
Adapted from @themindfulmocktail via Instagram.
Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
Becoming by Beholding, by Lanta Davis
Jessica Hooten Wilson
Ralph C. Wood
In the Beauty of Holiness, by David Lyle Jeffrey
Luke Ferriter
“Hurrahing in Harvest”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton
Flannery O’Connor
Grace Hammond
On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, by Karen Swallow Prior
Alan Noble
A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
Dorothy Sayers
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
James K.A. Smith
Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset
John Donne
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Related Trinity Forum Readings:
- Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset
- Spirit and Imagination: Reflections from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Strangest Story in the World, by G.K. Chesterton
- Sacred and Profane Love: the Poetry of John Donne
- Painting as a Pastime, by Winston Churchill
Related Conversations:
The Strangest Story in the World: GK Chesterton and the Incarnation with Dale Ahlquist
Life, Death, Poetry, & Peace with Philip Yancey