Converting the Imagination: Teaching to Recover Jesus' Vision for Fullness of Life (Horizons in Religious Education)

For two thousand years countless people around the world viewed reality through a Christian lens that endowed their lives with meaning, purpose, and coherence. Today, in an era of unprecedented secularization, many have ceased to find meaning not only in Christianity but in life in general. In Converting the Imagination, Patrick Manning offers a probing analysis of this crisis of meaning, marshalling historical and psychological research to shed light on the connections among the disintegration of the Christian worldview, religious disaffiliation, and a growing mental health epidemic. As a response Manning presents an approach to religious education that is at once traditionally grounded in the model of Jesus’ own teaching and augmented by modern educational research and cognitive science. Converting the Imagination is an invitation to transform the way we teach about faith and make sense of the world, an invitation that echoes Jesus’ invitation to a fuller, more meaningful life. It is sure to captivate scholars and practitioners of religious education, ministers seeking to reengage people who have drifted away from the faith or to support young people suffering from existential anxiety, and anyone in search of deeper meaning in their religious traditions or in their own lives.

Patrick R. Manning is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and the Chair of the Department of Pastoral Theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University. His teaching and research are focused in the areas of religious education, pastoral ministry, theological anthropology, and generally making sense of human beings and how we can live life more abundantly together.