Faith Maps

This is the title of a book by Michael Paul Gallagher. (Faith Maps: Ten Religious Explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2011.) A very well written book, explores ten Catholic thinkers who have paved special ways towards understanding and contextualizing the Christian faith in the contemporary world. The ten thinkers dealt with in the book are: John Henry Newman, Maurice Blondel, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernard Lonergan, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothee Soelle, Charles Taylor, Pierangelo Sequeri, and Joseph Ratzinger.

Role of Imagination

For J.H. Newman, the function of imagination was literally to 'realise' faith, in the sense of making God real in a person's life. ... 'The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination.' ... There is an important pastoral insight here: unless religious truth touches our imagination in some way, it will fail to become personally alive. [Michael Gallagher, Faith Maps 15.]