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Judith Wolfe, The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. xii + 196. $32.99

Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: University of St Andrews, may well have been anticipating something rather different.Arising from the Hulsean Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, published by Cambridge University Press, and with a title invoking immense and weighty themesall this might intimate a lengthy volume, with a dense and strongly defended argument.In fact, the book is disarmingly short, pellucid, and carries a tone that is more suggestive than assertive, tentative and exploratory, though certainly not lacking in conviction.On the back cover, Sarah Coakley calls it a 'creative meditation'; that, I think, is a fair description.Wolfe's text joins a burgeoning swell of writing on the theological dimensions of the human imagination.She is not especially worried about defending the term 'imagination' itself, nor defining it precisely; her concern is rather with what it has often been used to evoke, namely, the interplay active in all human perception and understandingindeed, all our engagement with the worldbetween finding and making, discovery and construction.We bump into the world, but what we bump into is never encountered 'raw'; to some extent, it will always be the product of our construal.Wolfe is thus no anti-realist: there is a world 'out there' to be found.But, in that finding, she insists, our ability to integrate discrete data into meaningful wholes is inevitably at work, even if typically 'under the radar'.The two activities, the receptive and the constructive, are inseparably intertwined: 'we cannot neatly separate out finding from making, seeing from construing, perceiving from interpreting' (p.12).Wolfe believes the arts play a critically important role in relation to this interplay, for they 'enable us to become aware of our imaginative work, and thereby expand its possibilities' (p.19).She demonstrates this by attending to a range of artworks (especially pieces of visual and literary art), slipping with consummate ease between different genres and historical periods.Among the literary giants, Shakespeare receives an especially close and illuminating reading.C. S. Lewis is also clearly one of Wolfe's favourites: indeed, it is not hard to sense the Lewisian stress on the truth-disclosing power of the imagination.Throughout, Wolfe also invites a wide variety of interlocutors to her table (she is interdisciplinary by nature), not least leading figures in the
DOI: 10.1017/s0036930625101063
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7125412769
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