Everything we take in, from literature to music to the words of a friend, forms us, laying the groundwork for our spiritual, moral and emotional growth. As each of us seeks to understand our own place in God’s creation, how can an imaginative approach help provide wisdom? What can we learn from the ways Christian culture-makers through the centuries have shown the beauty of God through what they’ve made?

Lanta Davis, author of Becoming By Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation, joins us in conversation with Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Jessica Hooten Wilson to explore the ways our souls are formed through our imaginations.

We thank our co-host, Baker Academic, for their support of this event!

Please note the transcript may contain inaccuracies and should not be used as an authoritative source. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Welcome to today’s conversation with Lanta Davis on her book Becoming by Beholding: the Power of Imagination and Spiritual Formation. We’re so delighted that you’re joining us, as Cherie said, my name is Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson, I’m the Fletcher Jones chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and I am a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum. I’d also like to thank the sponsors of this particular conversation which includes Baker Publishing who published Lanta’s book, as also my publisher Brazos Press who I have. published three books now. Today we have over 1,250 registrants. I think we’re up to 1300 now with 160 new people. So we are delighted that this is your first time with Trinity Forum, 121 of the registrants are international, representing over 22 countries including Cambodia, Hungary, Pakistan, Nigeria and Malaysia. So, thank you for joining us today. If you are a first time guest and you’re new to the work of Trinity Forum, Trinity Forum seeks to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith. They offer programs like this online conversation today in order to come to know better the author of the answers. We hope you get a taste of that from our discussion today. Lanta Davis, who is joining us, is an award winning teacher and author. She’s a professor of humanities and literature for the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University, where she teaches classes on the imagination, beauty, and the Great Text. In addition to her book, Becoming By Beholding, her writing has appeared in publications such as Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Christianity Today, Plow, Parabola, and Christian Century. She’s an interdisciplinary scholar who has researched across the humanities, lecturing and writing on topics as diverse as ancient Christian art, Renaissance gardens, Harry Clarke, stained glass, virtues and vices, and contemporary Irish fiction. And also, we’ve been friends for over 15 years because we were both students at Baylor University in the PhD program there in religion and literature. So welcome, friend.

Lanta Davis: Thank you. It’s so exciting to be here and to get to chat with you.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: So both Lanta and I have dedicated a large swath of our time to cultivating the imagination. Our intellectual formation took place at kind of the end of the heyday of faith and reason conversations, and maybe near the end of the post worldview kind of ideas. And instead, we were steeped in a lot of readings and courses and under the guidance and teachers of mentors such as Ralph C. Wood, David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke Ferriter and others, and they were emphasizing more this role of imagination in spiritual formation. You see that in Lanta’s work, and she goes beyond the literary aesthetic to explore the ways that icons, medieval bestiaries, stained glass windows, architecture, paintings. I mean, this is really kind of a broad coverage of the different ways that the Christian imagination is being formed. Lanta, I’m just going to let you dive right in by unpacking how you did this, why you’re going about it. Let’s start with just the title. The title in itself is, I think, enough of an intrigue for people to talk about the spiritual imagination. What does it mean “becoming by beholding”?

Lanta Davis: So I was really inspired in part by the verse in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “We all, with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” And so I was just very much struck when I was thinking about this book how much Scripture mentions the word behold. And I love this word because it’s so much more than just look, there’s even in the language itself, the sense of holding on to, of inscribing onto the soul of kind of looking to be transformed. And I was also really compelled how often in Scripture conversions tend to be a transformation of vision. So Paul is blinded and then sees again the women at Christ’s tomb don’t recognize the resurrected Christ at first, and then suddenly their eyes are open and they do. So I was just kind of thinking that Jesus of Nazareth isn’t exactly, you know, walking around in my neighborhood. So what kind of mirrors do we have to behold the glory of the Lord and be transformed? So I wanted to just kind of dig into some of the ways that Christians of the past have asked us to behold certain kinds of works, of stories, as a way to encourage us to become more like Christ, to become more in the image of his glory.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: That’s fantastic. As you were talking, I was thinking of that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem where Harangue and Harvest, where he says, these things were all here but the beholder wanted. Like, God has kind of put this treasure trove of images that form us and just desires that we actually become those beholders. And I think your book is part of that process. It’s a resource for how to become those beholders and which I love. You open your introduction by saying, “Christians live in an enchanted world.” The language is so good! “Perhaps even magical.” I love that, your next line says “Resurrection—” you’re explaining what you mean— “Resurrection overcomes death. Wine becomes blood. Water imparts salvation. Full of mysteries, surprises, and paradoxes, Christianity is a faith of the Upside Down, a holy, beautiful confusion.” Can you talk more about how you open the book this way? What does it mean to live in an enchanted, magical world? And why are you trying to make us more comfortable with maybe talking about our reality with this vocabulary?

Lanta Davis: So I wanted in part with this book to just try as much as I could to increase our capacity for wonder. I just firmly believe that the world is symbolic, that every last thing has layers of hidden meaning. So by magic, I don’t mean obviously abracadabra, I mean mystery, I mean surprises. I really think there’s a kind of fairy tale logic to the Gospels. Like, who would expect a carpenter from Nazareth to be the savior of the world? And 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 shows us, 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. So I think no matter what tradition you’re from, I do think we should appreciate mystery. The many inexplicable elements of Christianity. 

Our central claims are that God is 3 in 1, and that Jesus is somehow both fully human and fully divine. And I think if we’re honest, we have to admit those are pretty strange claims. They just don’t make logical sense. And I think that that means that if we want to live into those beliefs, we have to start seeing things instead of the logic of eternity. The wonderful kind of bonus of that is that it does make everything more magical that we get to see, like you said with the Hopkins poem, all of these surprises, all of these wonderful things hiding for us that God is trying to reveal himself in. So I really do love thinking about the world as enchanted, as symbolic, as just saturated with meaning, and therefore it just has so many hidden layers for us to try to investigate and try to develop the eyes to see.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: I love that, the idea of the logic of eternity. That’s gorgeous right. That’s very like T.S. Eliot, “The Occupation of the Saint” to find out where the kairos hit the chronos. That’s gorgeous. And you’re really in this tradition. Now, I didn’t necessarily send you this question, but I think you’re also probably familiar with the kinds of conversations you and I usually have, because what it makes me think of, like when you’re talking about this contemporary moment. But what you’re doing is drawing on all these resources of the past. I mean, why do we have to go backwards?Why do you have to seek a resource from the past in order to see this logic of eternity? Why did you in particular go back to even traditions that aren’t necessarily the one you’re from, right? You’re reaching into Catholic sources and Orthodox sources and across the church. Why do you think this is a necessary way of approaching this investigation?

Lanta Davis: Yeah, I’ve always really appreciated G.K. Chesterton, who talks about tradition as the democracy of the dead, and I think we so emphasize the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit is moving now that we forget to remember that the Holy Spirit has been working across time. And so I love plunging into how other people have seen some of these questions, how they’ve addressed them, the ways that they have, I think, really worked through how to better use art to align with scripture, how to engage our imaginations, and it helps to correct sort of the myopia of the present that we tend to see the kind of tunnel vision, if we’re only looking through the lens of our current, both problems and our current gifts. And so the past, I think, has a really great way of giving us a new lens to look at that opens up new perspectives. And especially, in my book, I tried to root every single one of the sections in the first 500 years of the church. So when they were really trying to figure out, okay, this is our faith, what does that look like in practice? It helps to show that these questions were at the heart of what they wanted to be doing from the very beginning. do it just, I think, gives us a little bit of a correction, not that the past, as C.S. Lewis was without its own problems, but they were oftentimes different problems, right, than we have. So being able to look at how they’ve shared this wisdom with us, I think enriches our own view and just follows in line of tradition as kind of passing the baton on from one generation to the next. And I really appreciate that. And that’s something my teachers did so well for me, that I wanted to kind of be part of that process of passing down what I’ve appreciated, what’s helped me grow from the past into the next generation.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: I love that, and you just cited Chesterton, and that has a lot to do with how you tilted your various sections. If people aren’t familiar with your book, one of the things that I love that you did is you are titling the first section “Orthodoxy”, right? Definitely allusion to Chesterton’s masterful work on Orthodoxy, and then “Orthopraxy” and “Orthopathy”. And then underneath that, you’re really starting a dialog with us. You definitely are practicing what you are trying to teach and that they are forming questions. You are inviting us to wonder about these things in the ways that you’ve engaged even the chapters. But maybe those words are not familiar to everyone, and maybe you could do us a favor and kind of explain what it means to have Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy Orthopathy? Why are those important phrases to return to the life of the church and think through?

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So, they’re obviously all interconnected. Orthodoxy generally means right belief, orthopraxis, right practices, orthopathy kind of right emotions or passions. I loosely kind of correlate them with mind, body and heart. So I don’t know if this is helpful, but I sometimes talk about this with my students with kind of a sports example. So if I’m learning basketball, orthodoxy is kind of like learning the rules of the game, understanding what dribbling is, how to score, kind of the basic foundational elements. Orthopraxy is kind of like practicing the drills, like getting my body used to playing the game, learning how not to travel, things like that, shooting over and over again so that I can score points. Then Orthopathy is kind of like disciplining our emotions so that I have the perseverance to keep practicing even when I’m tired, or maybe, if I’m trying to shoot a free throw to win the game, I don’t psych myself out. And so, in Christianity, I kind of think about this as orthopathy is kind of the narrative, so what are my beliefs? When I say I am a Christian, What do I mean? So this is the story, I believe about God, about the world around me and it’s essentially kind of the plot. Orthopraxy is how I learn to live according to those beliefs. So how do I live according to the logic of the plots of the story that I believe in? So that I can actually align my beliefs with my life. And then Orthopathy is thinking about how to train my desires, my feelings, my passions according to the logic of this story. So we’re told to love our neighbor but how do I actually learn to do that if my neighbor happens to be really, really annoying? There are ways that we can train ourselves and help to align our emotions with what God is asking of us, I think, and all three of them help us become more unified in our aim, so that my body isn’t fighting against my beliefs or my emotions aren’t preventing me from doing the practices I ought to be practicing.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: So good. I love the sports analogy. I’ve never used that in the classroom. If that’s not trademarked, I’m stealing that for the next time that I teach these things, because I think that really puts it into an image that I can understand. I think that’s fantastic. I do want you to unpack more, though. So you go through these different sections and you’re drawing on different resources in the church tradition in order for us to really see, okay, what is Orthodoxy? What is Orthopraxy? Let’s start with Orthodoxy. In that section you are looking at icons, right? You’re trying to give us an image of how we see Jesus. I think of one of my favorite teachers who gave the commencement address at John Brown University years ago when she retired, Robbie Casselman, and she said, if you’re not actually reading the scriptures, the Jesus you worship may look more like you than it does in the scriptures. So I think you’re doing a great service to the church and the kingdom here by giving us a way of understanding how to find Jesus and how to recognize him. And then you talk about the medieval bestiaries, right. And what is our place in creation? Could you maybe dig into this more and unpack? How does this have to do with our right way of seeing, to look at icons and the medieval bestiary?

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So, I’ll talk first about what I love about both of them, and then I can maybe do a little bit more in the specifics of them. But what I love about both icons and bestiaries is that they’re so bizarre, icons tend to be a little unsettling when I’m looking at them, I feel like their eyes are just like watching me and following me around. They seem to be kind of piercing. The proportions make no sense. The colors are really intense. I think that bestiaries have a similar kind of weirdness to them. Like, there’s rainbow colored panthers, there’s phoenixes, there’s all sorts of animals that sort of seem familiar to us, but just seem a little bit off. And what I didn’t really realize when I first saw that, honestly, I just thought they were terrible artists, but I didn’t know that that eeriness was actually intentional. There is this sense that we tend to default into a kind of tunnel vision, we get distracted by our plans, our worries, whatever and this can, I think, oftentimes limit our vision so that we’re barely seeing anything at all. So I’ll maybe be walking and be so lost in my own head that I won’t notice a thing around us. And we need someone, I think, to almost, like, jump out behind a tree and kind of get us to wake up and pay attention. And I know you’re Flannery O’Connor person, and she’s great at this, too, right? Like startling us into reality. So icons and bestiaries are this great reawakening of our eyes, they’re surprising us, they’re unsettling us so that we pay better attention and really try to open our eyes to see more of reality. So when it comes to something like the image of Jesus, for instance, let’s see if I can successfully share my screen.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: What’s wonderful is you include, as you’re finding that, if you include these even in your book. I love that you did that.

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So, the Christ the Pantocrator image, this is in Mount Sinai, in their library, which is already just so cool because it’s one of the oldest monasteries in the world, one of the oldest libraries in the world, one of the oldest icons in the world. This Jesus is admittedly very unsettling. Like, I’m sure you immediately notice that he has two different eyes and they seem to kind of follow you around a little bit. And what I appreciate about icons and something that I didn’t understand about them is that even if you’re skeptical as a Protestant, which is fair, icons are, if nothing else, a really wonderful teaching tool for helping us understand the basics of our belief. And so this image is a really fantastic introduction to the incarnation. And I think its unsettling quality is also already really helpful at reminding us, like how you mentioned we don’t want to make Jesus just look like ourselves. We need to know that as much as we plumb into the depths of our faith, that there’s something always going to be inexplicable, that we aren’t going to be able to, like, own Jesus or make him fully us. And so that unsettling quality constantly hits us and reminds us of that fact as we’re looking. Then within the image itself, too, like if you put your hand over, like the right side, or on your right side, you see the Eye of Mercy on the other side, it’s the eye of judgment that we’re reminded of that dual quality.

Lanta Davis: The book that he’s holding has both the cross, of course, on it, but we also have three dots. And so those three dots remind us of Jesus as being part of the Trinity. He’s also holding his hand up in that gesture of both 2 in 1 is up and then the three fingers here are touching for the Trinity. And so the whole image, and sorry, there’s a whole lot more, but it would take me almost a half hour to describe all of it. But just how rich in symbolism icons are and then they’re trying to give us a kind of visual orthodoxy so that what we see is reflecting what it is that we’re saying when we rehearse the creeds and say, “I believe.” So I really appreciate that the early Christians did try to think about how to visually depict what it was that our words were saying, and also our liturgy was trying to perform. So they seem, again, maybe sometimes scary to Protestants, but I think they offer so many wonderful ways to help us better understand what can be really impossible concepts. Like, I had so many questions about the incarnation and the Trinity, and icons are things that finally help me enter into the reality of what I’m professing a little bit more than just reading definitions and hearing explanations.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Well, I love that. I think if people have not yet had access to your book, I think you gave them a great insight into what you do there and how to inspire those of us who are not used to reading icons into reading them and finding a place in our faith life for them. If I can take maybe back to one of my favorite parts of the book and let you explore one of the practices that you talk about. So you and I, in both of our work, we talk about lectio divina, that was something that I discovered in graduate school that was not from my faith tradition and became part of my own spiritual practice of how to read scriptures. I’m sure a lot of people are probably familiar with it, but one of the things I thought you did with it, which was phenomenal and a very moving story. I mean, it had me in tears when I was reading the story, was you talked about teaching the practice of lectio divina with your students and how one of them actually put himself imaginatively into the place of Barabbas in the Gospel of Matthew. Would you unpack why that’s a beautiful exercise, and like what that student discovered and what you discovered hearing his lectio divina practice?

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So I love lectio divina for so many reasons, but in part because it slows us down .We tend to read very quickly trying to consume information. And lectio divina instead approaches scripture very prayerfully very much trying to meditate on it. And what I’m suggesting in this section of the book is to kind of pair lectio divina with Ignatian Imaginative Prayer, which does ask you to imagine yourself into the scriptural story. That’s so powerful because we talk about trying to live the word, to live into the word and this is a way to actually put ourselves into the story, like to see ourselves as one of the characters, one of the people. And so my student was practicing this, and he was thinking about Jesus being judged by Pilate. And he imagined himself as Barabbas. And as he was reading the story, he kind of wondered, of course, like, where would I be in this story? Jesus is being judged. There’s the crowd, probably I would still be in prison somewhere. So I probably wouldn’t be able to hear Pilate’s questions, but I would probably be able to hear the loud chanting of the crowd. So he thought about that and so Pilate is asking, “What do you want me to do with this prisoner?” “Crucify him, crucify him, crucify him.”

Lanta Davis: And then he asks, “Who do you want me to free? Jesus or Barabbas?” And then here’s the crowd. “Barabbas. Barabbas. Barabbas.” And so, in Barabbas’ mind, it’s very possible that all he heard was his name and then crucified him. And so as he walked out of the prison, he really felt what it was to realize that Jesus was actually taking his place, that he was going to be crucified instead of him. And so, as he imagined himself in Barabbas, it helped hit home this idea of what Christ did the way that he bears our sin for us and just made what could be a really routine story that we hear over and over again and maybe sometimes distance ourselves from and give it a new life, give it a new vividness, and helped him kind of appreciate it from a fully different, different angle. I love imaginative prayer. It really helps to give more depth behind these stories and helps you think about what it is that you’re reading more deeply. Letting Scripture really shape your own experience.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: It’s so gorgeous to me because, of course, you know, as Christians, we recognize that Christ is taking our place on the cross. But getting to hear your student meditate on the drama of the moment, I mean, you can almost imagine that it would be written by Dorothy L. Sayers or something, right? That she would imagine being in that position and the ways that Barabbas would have felt to actually see him take his place. I mean, it’s just lovely. I love that you’re doing that with your students. You also have a huge section in orthopathy on the virtues. Virtues seem to be a very hot topic right now. The idea of virtues and vices. I’m kind of seeing it everywhere. I just had the privilege of getting to write the foreword for Grace Hammond, who is a medievalist, and she wrote a whole book on the virtues. That is amazing. You know, Karen Swallow Prior is On Reading Well, and The Scandal of Holiness, all the holy virtues. I think our friend Alan Noble is writing a book on virtues. Okay, so one of the things that I have a question about when it comes to virtues is what are you adding to this conversation? So why do we have such a fascination right now with virtues? And to kind of frame my question a little bit more, I wanted to tell you, I had this conversation with a colleague recently in which I was telling her what the great books department does at Pepperdine. And I was saying, you know, we’re really leading students towards a life of virtue. We’re trying to cultivate virtue with our students. And that means, you know, asking them these questions, etc.. And she said, well, who are you to tell them what the virtues are? Whose virtues? And I thought, oh, we’re missing the virtue tradition. You know, that was like square one for me to think about these questions. So could you explain maybe more of the virtue tradition and why it needs such a comeback and then how you contribute to that?

Lanta Davis: I think that for people who are skeptical about the virtues, like your colleague, sometimes it might actually help to start with the vices. Devices because we’re very much in the age of “you be you,” kind of “follow your dreams” and we forget that actually getting what we want might not be good for us. That our feelings can actually entrap us, and we can see that really clearly when we start looking at devices. So if we take something like envy, like, it feels very natural. It’s very easy, but it takes away joy, and it separates me from my neighbor. So envy can hurt my relationship with my neighbor if I’m seeing them, as always, seeming to do, like, just a little bit better than me. I might start to resent them. I might start not only being sad when something good happens to them, but even really treacherously, a little bit happy if something goes bad for them. Um, and in the process of that, envy also hurts me. So depictions of envy. And I have one because I love personifications of envy. I think they’re really bizarre. She’s often times eating a snake of some sort and so this idea of envy is thinking about how we’re poisoning ourselves with venom.

Lanta Davis: So I’m comparing myself to everybody so much that I poison everything good in my life. So just because it doesn’t seem as good, maybe as to what somebody else has. So that new car that I got suddenly loses its shine when I see my friend has a slightly fancier car. So when we think about it this way, envy really has a kind of damaging effect. It leads to a self-destruction. So in contrast to the vices which lead us to this kind of self-destruction, to making ourselves into a kind of monster that injures ourselves, the virtues correct our vices and free us from ourselves. So the virtues are equipping us to live a good life and I think the more classical sense of it is that a virtue is an excellence of something. So to be virtuous means to be a thriving person. So as to your friend’s question, your colleague’s question of which virtues. There’s definitely several. But traditionally, Christians name the three theological virtues, which I’m sure we’re all familiar with, which is faith, hope, and love. But they paired those three virtues, usually with the four cardinal virtues of prudence, which just means practical wisdom, justice, courage and temperance, and those four virtues have been around for, I mean, centuries upon centuries.

Lanta Davis: Christians drew upon the ancient Greek and Roman understandings of them. As far as I could tell, Ambrose, already in the fourth century, was the one who called those four virtues cardinal. And cardinal just means to hinge and it’s related to the cardinal directions. So I like to think about the cardinal virtues as kind of like our moral compass that orient our passions. So what’s great about the virtues or sorry, what’s great about art of the virtues is that virtues can be, I think it’s kind of abstract, like I want to be wise… But how? Like, what does wisdom even mean, besides maybe something a little more impressive sounding than that I’m smart or experienced. So art of the virtues, like personifications, where they’re imagining the virtue as a person can teach us the basics of the virtue and then their art, the beauty of their arts, can inspire us to imitate what we see. So I do really appreciate how much this tradition pops up in Christian churches, in their illuminated manuscripts, in all sorts of different places because they’re wanting to continually remind us that to live well, we need to be virtuous.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. I was going to invite people to ask more questions. And as they’re kind of putting their questions in the Q&A. So please fill up our Q&A and we’ll be choosing from there for conversations with Lanta. So we’ll pull from some of those. But as that is kind of filling up in the corner, I want to just not push back, but just maybe ask you to move your book into a more practical, which is always hard for academics, right? We love studying this stuff and discovering things and then just sharing what we discover. But what does it look like for people who are on the ground with these various practices? So I’m sure we have pastors here. I’m sure we have teachers. We have people who are, I saw in some of the Q&A, grandparents and parents, and what does this look like to teach the virtues, to return to a way of imagining them? I mean, are we going to put the image of the basilisk eating the person who’s envious, like on our doors? Do we need I mean, you know, I actually was at the dinner table last night trying to teach my son about envy and how it will eat you like a snake from within you. And, you know, so it is part of my parent culture, but not everybody’s parent culture. But what does this look like really to as a practical way? How do we have these images back into our culture? How can we do that for the next generation?

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So I think well, let me start by actually talking about how practical personifications are maybe in general for helping us understand the virtues. So here’s just courage, for instance, we oftentimes think that we know what courage means, but it often times ends up looking something like being brave in a moment of, like, high crisis. But the Christian understanding of courage is so much richer than that. And I love how much art can help us understand that, that the symbols itself become a teaching tool and become very practical. So here, for instance, courage is and it’s a little bit hard to see from this angle, but she’s leaning back, The courage always needs to lean on God and has this pillar that she relies on for the strength of her courage. And so she’s also decked out in the armor of God here. But there’s also a sense that she’s leaning both for reliance on God, but also that she might be kind of tired. So courage is not just this, like, battle readiness, this warrior pose, it’s also perseverance and that means that we need courage every day to persevere through trials, through difficulties, through our exhaustion, sometimes our stress in order to embrace the good that God has offered us.

Lanta Davis: My favorite detail of this is that she’s pulling this dragon from the castle. Again, not in this dramatic sense of we all need to go fight dragons, but that really, this symbolizes fighting the dragon that’s in the castle of the soul. That the castle was oftentimes a metaphor for the soul. And so we need courage to combat the monster that lives within and so looking at courage this way, I think gives us that depth and is one of the reasons that I love using the imagination, using artwork to teach because it is so practical, it helps me enter into, again, what just feels so abstract in this really tangible way and it helps imprint upon our memory what courage really is, so that when I need to be courageous, I also hopefully will remember more clearly what that looks like. So Arts, isn’t this luxurious extra, I think it really is a very practical, concrete way for us to dive into some of these questions.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Well, we have emblems from the church of the past. I hope there’s a way that we can also incorporate these in the future. One of the questions that came up actually is for artists who want to pick up this tradition and move forward with it. I think it was David Grusel who was asking, okay, so how can artists do this? Learning from the virtue tradition without becoming didactic, without making their art propaganda or too teachy preachy? Is the language he’s using in the Q&A?

Lanta Davis: Yeah, so I think I’m more of a fan of allegories than the average artist. I love symbolic language, and I know that rightfully so, artists have some skepticism about becoming symbolic didactic but I would love to see a refresher of the virtues because there’s so many ways that this could look, like you could focus on some of the saints who have embodied these virtues, for instance, like maybe you could still use some of those symbolism, but help to better represent the ways that the virtues are embodied across the world. So how do we see, for instance, somebody like Perpetua and Felicity, how do they embody courage to us? There’s all sorts of ways to reinvent these and still get at what I think I find most helpful about images of the virtues and that they both teach and inspire, how can we maybe reimagine some of the symbolism? How do we rethink what they look like and that will give us, I think, a great depth and give us new ways of talking about them and making them relevant again, because some of them do look, as much as I love them and are beautiful, they do look a little stuffy sometimes. So I would love for somebody to to reimagine these.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. Oh, I mean, I’m with you. I agree with that. I would love to see what they would look like in contemporary settings. So one of the other questions we have from an anonymous attendee is, in your experience, especially as a teacher working with this next generation, do you find that trying to persuade students about the importance of imagination is more difficult in All Charles Taylor, the secular, disenchanted age that we’re living in. Have you had experience, maybe pushback or hurdles that have arisen?

Lanta Davis: Kind of, yeah, that’s a good question. I have a class that I teach called rhetoric in the Sacramental Imagination, and I have them first semester, freshman year. So it really does feel like the big part of making a sculpture, right where you’re, like, chipping away at the really big parts before you can do the polishing and the smoothing and the really clear shaping. I think students are hungry for it though. So there’s a little bit of resistance in terms of getting nervous. And again, I understand I’m at a Protestant school, I am a Protestant. And so I need to oftentimes do a lot of legwork in terms of helping them understand that what we’re drawing upon in the imaginative tradition is all of ours. That it is our shared heritage and therefore not something to be feared, but instead this like a treasure trove that’s waiting for us to draw upon. So that part is tricky but I have them do a lot of dorky things that they hate in the beginning, but end up, I think, finding it pretty valuable. At least they claim that they find them valuable at the end. So I have them do exercises like we do talk about bestiaries and then they look up, for instance, what would a modern bestiary look like? If they’re trying to research, for instance, like a lily,not just the scientific details about it, but what if Christians talked about with the symbolism of the lily? How do we see it with spiritual sights? What can it even teach us and show us? And so they’ll do that kind of thing and just realize that nature has kind of more under the surface than we think. And then I’ll have them do activities like go for a walk in what I call the Enchanted Forest, and just really look and pay attention and start to engage their imaginations and exercise it. And I think by the end, there is a sense that it offers them this richer experience, this way of looking at the world that makes things so much more enriching, so much more lively because we have unfortunately kind of crammed down a lot of students throats that you are your work, that you’re kind of only good for what you produce. And I really try to exercise the imagination and to get them in thinking about the imagination, to think about how we need to attend to beauty so that we can live more fully and learn how to just be human, much more than what our technology or our kind of trajectory as money makers tends to be.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, well, those who have not read your book yet are not yet familiar with the grand scope of things that you cover here when you talk about what to witness and what to behold. But some of the things that you don’t touch on unless I’m forgetting is music and you don’t do a whole lot of stories, literature, poetry, Right?

Lanta Davis: I do some Dante. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson: But what would it look like maybe for the average reader who’s not reading Dante, unless they are, what does it look like to have our imagination? So this is kind of drawing a few questions together from the Q&A of people who are asking about music, and then also just fiction, reading literature that’s around us right now. Are there ways that those could be resources to help us become what we behold?

Lanta Davis: Yes, absolutely. I think in talking about the title, I didn’t probably introduce the imagination the way that I’m talking about it as thoroughly as I could. The imagination is often, I think, in our popular understanding, more like fairy tales, fantasy, make believe like a kid playing princess in the backyard. But the imagination, the way that I’m talking about it, is much more of a way of understanding our reality, that the imagination actually shapes how we understand reality and that comes from the kinds of stories that I’m reading. It comes from the kinds of images that I’m paying attention to. So, yes, certainly reading is a way to exercise the imagination because the thing about the imagination is that it’s kind of like wax in that if we’re not purposefully forming it and putting particular kinds of images or stamps or stories upon it, something else will. And the default tends to be, I think, especially today, fear, narratives of fear, images of fear, things like that and we need to be really active about exercising the imagination. And certainly I think music is part of that, too. I didn’t touch on that in my book because unfortunately, I’m not gifted in this area at all.

Lanta Davis: I think a lot of other people have done it quite well and also because the way that I’m talking about the imagination isn’t as much the social imaginary as what, like Jamie Smith does and a few others, it’s more along the lines of the philosophical and theological tradition of thinking about the imagination as a faculty of our soul and it’s shaped by kind of certain patterns that have impressed it. So those can be, again, images, stories. I kind of break it down into images and stories, heroes and places just to make it a little bit easy to enter into. But certainly music shapes us and forms us, especially when we’re thinking about things like our emotions. Helping to ennoble the soul. So the imagination is this behemoth of a term I feel like and my husband makes fun of me, but I rewrote my introduction, I think 30 times just because it was so hard to pin down what I was trying to say about the imagination. But certainly that’s a big part of shaping us and another thing that we should intentionally pay attention to, practice,and embed into our attention to beauty.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah, well, I totally agree with you. I mean, this is where I am, and I talk about, in my work, this relationship between the things that we’re reading and watching and listening to and how they affect our reading of Scripture and then our reading of Scripture. How that then helps us decide what to read and watch and attend to and so some of our questions are along those lines. If you’d be willing to answer questions like that. So I’m going to kind of put a couple of questions together. We have Douglas Griffith is asking about Scripture and the new creations of films or TV series that are based on scripture that are kind of playing a role in our imaginative or cultural life, like House of David and The Chosen. So I wondered if you had thought of that and another question from James Zeller is asking, okay, what about the fruits of the spirit? What role does that play in the life of cultivating virtue and imagining the fruits of the spirit, right to become more like what the spirit asks of us? So maybe you can answer this relationship between the Bible and our cultural imagination.

Lanta Davis: In terms of the popular shows that are coming out, I think they could be good and I do appreciate that they’re offering us a new way of thinking about Scripture. And from what I have gathered there, trying to be pretty attentive and faithful to the stories. But I am always a little bit hesitant because I want to make sure that our imaginations aren’t so shaped by popular conceptions of Scripture that we’re not doing some of our own imaginative work as well. So I love films, I definitely think of them as something that can shape us, engage us, can be beautiful works. But I also try to encourage pairing things like that with other imaginative practices because other imaginative practices or other angles of kind of thinking about some of these questions give us, I think, a richer vision. It can make sure that we don’t get too stuck on one idea of who Jesus is and how he acts. It just kind of forces us to do some of that work. Because if I think about Jesus as like the chosen Jesus, I might, for instance, miss how Jesus is working in different ways. Or I might start to again, not recognize how people from across the world will see Jesus and we need to develop a better breadth and depth of our imaginative work and kind of take on some of that responsibility to do some of the imaginative work. Fruits of the spirit was the second part of the question.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Well, yeah, I was going to say kind of I think that’s phenomenal. I honestly don’t know those series, but I know that my family, I have a lot of family who has really been enriched by those series. So I know that they definitely have a role to play. But I get what you’re saying with the past or being formed too much by the cultural moment or the present, but looking at something like the fruits of the spirit, right, is that aligned with virtue theory? Sometimes Dante gets criticized for being non-biblical, right? Because he seems like he’s glossing scripture so much that we have a hard time finding the Scripture within his virtue ethics.

Lanta Davis: Yeah. So I just focus on the cardinal virtues in my book, mostly for limited space, but there are actually personifications of a lot of the fruits of the spirit. So there is a charity personification. She’s often times depicted as a mother, which I think is really lovely, this kind of self-giving love to help us understand charity. There are personifications of patients of peace, self-control is temperance, which is definitely one of those, faith, typically is holding like a Eucharistic cup in the cross to kind of remind us of those basic symbols of our faith. Hope is oftentimes looking up, like her eyes are always lifted to find hope where she maybe can’t see it here on Earth. So certainly, the fruits of the spirit are part of the virtues that we should become like. And there are definitely artistic ways that inspire us and likewise teach us better what those might mean in the practical, concrete reality of trying to live them out.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. I too love all of the faith, hope and love virtues. And I have a lot of those in my house, probably more than the cardinal virtues represented. What about non-Western sources? One of the Q&A questions from an anonymous attendee is about, how does the global church use art to communicate these Christian ideas?

Lanta Davis: Yes, that is one of the things that I love the most about the Christian imagination is that it introduces us to traditions across the world and helps us enter into I think again, this way of seeing our faith through a multiplicity of eyes. So, I didn’t get to include in detail but I really love the Coptic tradition, especially the Ethiopian Coptic works, their illuminated manuscripts. Lalibela is, like the churches there are physically shaped out of stones and in crosses and incredible works. I really love some of the Egyptian Coptic things as well. I love in Mexico City, the image of the Our Lady of Guadalupe and what it represents and the story behind it. I love the way that they depict the Sacred Hearts imagery too. So certainly our imagination can and should be fired up by these different works from across the world.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Well, please do continue to ask questions. There’s a lot of Q and A that’s really just saying they want to take your classes, that they’re wishing that you taught online or you taught outside of the classroom at Indiana Wesleyan. So that’s really exciting for people. And they’re asking about other resources that some of them might use in their own classrooms. Are there recommendations you might have for teachers who are in high school or at other colleges that they can draw on in their own work, in their own teaching?

Lanta Davis: So I really love ArtWay, is one website where they actually present artworks that are described by scholars usually in both art and theology. And it helps just kind of enter into  understanding these works with greater depth. So I do appreciate that as one resource. And then this is kind of a simple thing and I have specific websites but of course did I write them down? I did not, but I have students frequently just to help us very practically engage our imaginations along with Scripture. There are all sorts of websites that will actually collect, like here’s 30 artworks that depict like Genesis one. So it can immediately show you this wide array of works that help you kind of imagine what that might look like or show you how artists have thought about that scene. So I have students compare, like Daniel and the Lion’s Den depictions, where one depiction, for instance, by Rubens, is like the length of a wall and the lion is terrifying and looking right out at you and Daniel is like cowering in the corner. It reminds you of that, the terror of it all, but then there are other depictions that show the lions almost like they’re my dog, who’s the most submissive, like, sweet thing ever. And they’re just like cowering instead of Daniel cowering, and Daniel’s just calmly staring at them. And we’re reminded that God, like, tamed these lions. So even just contrasting different depictions helps us enter into these stories, I think, in new ways, gives us new glimpses and can be really powerful and just an easy way to add something imaginative to what we’re probably already doing.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Well, hopefully after the conversation is over, Trinity Forum can help us out by making sure people get access to that. I was thinking of the Lynn Kohic Visual Museum. What is that called? 

Lanta Davis: Yeah. The visual gallery.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Visual Gallery of the Bible. That’s a phenomenal resource. So maybe we can list some of these out so that people have access to them later. We also have some.

Lanta Davis: I was just going to say, this just came out, but I love the Our Church Speaks book too, which is both images of different saints. So I like to think of the saints as our heroes or Christian heroes and then describe their stories. And so it’s matching both this, like, really compelling visual with also stories from people around the world who remind us of the depth and breadth of the church.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Fantastic. Yeah. And there’s also, David Lyle Jeffrey, this is not a website, but this is his book In the “Beauty of Holiness”, where he has, like all the images from the earliest days of the church, he actually begins when Jewish converts, Right? In the early days, all the way up until now. Contemporary art, which I think is lovely. So we have some people who are going to be going to Mount Sinai and are going to be traveling. Yes, so this is Lori Tischler from Houston, and she’s going to Egypt with Jerry Root and others in October. So what are some must-sees, maybe some of your favorite adventures of things that you’ve seen and traveled to that you can make a list for them, but also maybe some things you didn’t explore in the book that you want to talk about now?

Lanta Davis: Yeah, so I went to Mount Sinai and got to see the Christ the Pantocrator there, which was a double holy experience with climbing the mountain, as well as getting to see one of my favorite works. So that’s amazing. They also have the divine ladder. I’m trying to remember the name of it, but it’s a really unique artwork that shows kind of the ladder of contemplation and how easy it is to fall off of it. If you’re there and go to the Cairo area, I want to say that the hanging church was really incredible. The artwork in the Egypt churches is filled with this incredible, almost lattice work kind of wood. It’s just beautiful and I’m trying to remember, sorry I haven’t thought about this for a while. I think the cave church in Cairo, I’m trying to remember if that’s traditionally where the Holy Family stopped during their time in Egypt, or if that’s the hanging church. Sorry I’m blanking right now, but really worth stopping by and in Cairo, you just go to the Coptic district and there’s a lot of the stuff right there. Also bring water to Mount Sinai, unsurprisingly, for the hike.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: I will try not to envy you that you did that, especially as we’re talking about vices and virtues, but I’ve never had that opportunity. So one of our last questions here is from Don flow, and he talks about the narrative of Scripture and how from the garden to Jesus and in the wilderness on the cross, we see three areas where we’re attacked, right or fall, involving desire, trust, and identity. Where do you see us being malformed when it comes to current culture regarding our desire, trust and identity? And how then do our imaginative practices counteract that malformation of our desires and our trust and our identity?

Lanta Davis: I could probably tackle all three, but I definitely think I can talk about our desire and identity a little bit more easily. I think that the imagination very clearly can malform our desires in that what the imagination of our kind of popular culture teaches us is that we should be successful in this way that’s very financial, right? That is the dream life, the goal, the end. And so our pursuits tend to be very narrow minded in terms of what that looks like. So we start to think of everything, including education, as utilitarian, in that it helps us get to the end of making money. And so when our desires are so focused on this particular view on these kinds of ends, we miss, of course, all of the great things that we need besides money and we really neglect what actually makes a good life, which is, you know, love of God, love of neighbor, being able to love creation well. And so when we kind of buy into advertisements and how they shape our desires or buy into too much of the American dream and how much it shapes our desires, it really can malform what it is that we’re questing after. And when our desires are malformed like that, it definitely affects our sense of identity. So I could say this in terms of the American dream success, or we can also think about it like very clearly to me, how much our culture wars have hijacked the imagination to make us think about our identity in terms of political parties and who we’re standing against, as opposed to kind of who we are in Christ together. So the ways that I think are like news narratives and our social media habits and all those kinds of things are making us forget what our true identity is in Christ and instead that we see ourselves as kind of stuck in these particular positions and that our identity is more so kind of our political affiliation as opposed to our kingdom affiliation.

Jessica Hooten Wilson: So good, so good. Well, I would say amen to that. But before I give you the very last word, I want to make a few announcements on behalf of Trinity Forum. So as we’re concluding this session, we’ll be sending out a survey. So all of you who have registered, please dp fill out the survey letting us know what you thought of this conversation. And in doing so, as a small token of appreciation, we will offer a free digital copy of a Trinity Forum reading of your choice, so there are plenty of those to choose from. Kristin Lavransdatter I happen to have written the introduction, so I’m kind of biased towards that one. The Sacred and Profane Love of John Donne. Spirit and Imagination of Coleridge. Painting as a Pastime Winston Churchill. There’s plenty of options, so please do fill it out. You will receive a free digital copy of one of those readings. We will also be sending a follow up email with a recording to the link of this conversation, so you can pass it along to friends and share it with as many people as possible. We would really appreciate that from the Trinity Forum. Also, please take a chance to become a member of the Trinity Forum society. You can join at TTF.org. There will also be a link in the chat provided. And again as a token of appreciation or an incentive for that, any new membership of $100 or more new membership or gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Lanta’s book. So hopefully there are plenty of people that see that opportunity and take advantage of it. Upcoming events, there is another online conversation happening next week on April 4th, Faith and Foreign Aid. These are going to be insights from and for Christians. There will also be a Trinity Forum event in Nashville on April 29th with Dr. Lydia Dugdale, who I just am a huge fangirl of, I love Lydia. She’s a beautiful Christian and a great writer and a great speaker, so I know many people will be blessed by her. Lanta I’m going to give you the last word as we close.

Lanta Davis: Yeah, I’m going to just read a little bit from Goethe, which I really love, this little piece of advice that he gives. So he just says, “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

Jessica Hooten Wilson: Gorgeous, thank you. Well, thank you for all joining. Thank you again for Baker Publishing for sponsoring this conversation. If you are interested in sponsoring the conversation, please reach out to the Trinity Forum, they would love to host more of these kinds of conversations. Again, putting people in touch with the author of the answers to the greatest questions. Thank you again.