Introduction

Rehabilitating the religious imagination The suggestion that the imagination, let alone religious imagination, plays a central role in politics, and does so rightfully, constitutes itself an affront to a largely discredited but still persistent secularist conception of truth. This idea of truth relies on a narrow conception of reason which, exported from the scientific laboratory into the complex web of human experiences, rejects poetry and literary fiction as much as it disdains religion; consequently, at least among adherents to this model of reality, the imagination and religion are irrational flights of fancy, which in their benign forms may have private therapeutic value, but which all too often inspire religious visions of reality that inevitably lead to conflict and violence. The putative irrationality of religion seemed also proven by the progress of humanity, through the advancements of knowledge and technology, from superstitious conceptions of animate nature and its divinities toward a world fully illumined and rendered predictable by science. This has resulted in relegating religion and its attendant practices to the private sphere and disallowing any political import to religious beliefs.