Becoming by Beholding: The Power of the Imagination in Spiritual Formation

Christianity Today 2025 Book Award Finalist (Culture, Poetry, and the Arts) We tend to think of the imagination as the realm of fantasy and make believe. However, the imagination shapes our vision of reality in that the stories, symbols, and places that capture our hearts become part of who we are. Becoming by Beholding restores the imagination to its central role in spiritual formation by recovering key works from the Christian tradition, enabling us to experience the formative power of the imagination for ourselves. It also revives "the art of fashioning the soul" as an essential aspect of Christian spiritual formation and character development. Lanta Davis explains that many of the problems at the heart of the Christian church today--such as nationalism, consumerism, and partisan politics--stem from a crisis of the imagination. She encourages us to reorient our gaze from diseased cultural forms and fix our eyes instead on works from the historic Christian imaginative tradition that