“All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.”
Russell Kirk wrote that in 1955.
Seven decades later, Karen Swallow Prior shows how prophetic Kirk was in her book, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis.
Evangelicalism was born in the early eighteenth century, but as Prior argues, it came of age in the Victorian Era. By the twentieth century, evangelical culture was so intertwined with Victorian culture that it became hard to tell the difference. The result is that the Evangelical Imagination, the set of metaphors and images which define the movement, was solidified in ways that would look very familiar to someone living in late nineteenth century England.
Read the rest at The University Bookman
Related Posts
Prior, Karen Swallow On Reading Well “On Living Well”
Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy “Chesterton and the Elves”
Leave a Reply