WOF 242: What Is Imaginative Apologetics?
The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
Brandon Vogt
4.9 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2020
⏱️ 21 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
How do we share the Faith in a culture where many people don’t understand what we mean by words like "sin" or "salvation"—and where the media constantly bombards us with the idea that the teachings of the Church are irrelevant, outdated, or bigoted?
All too often, people aren’t even interested in hearing about the Faith! Especially when we seek to reach young people or bring back those who have left the Church, we must find ways to communicate more effectively—in short, to make our arguments meaningful. Here, the imagination is essential, but often neglected.
In this sample lesson from her Word on Fire Institute course, Dr. Holly Ordway focuses on the role of the imagination in apologetics, showing how attention to language and meaning can make the work of catechesis and evangelization much more effective.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vat, the host and the content director |
| 0:10.5 | at Word on Fire. Bishop Baron is not with us today for this episode, but we're going |
| 0:15.9 | to be sharing with you a special sample audio lesson from our Word on Fire Institute. |
| 0:20.9 | Today, we're going to hear a sample from a course titled, Imaginative Apologetics. |
| 0:26.8 | This taught inside our institute by Dr. Holly Ordway, one of the leading figures in this |
| 0:31.9 | conversation between evangelization, imagination, literature, art, the course is all about how |
| 0:38.1 | to help people find meaning and understand the faith through stories, imagery, metaphor, |
| 0:44.8 | and more. It's a wonderful course. Thousands of people have already gone through it. Today, |
| 0:49.4 | we're going to hear lesson number one, which is titled, What is Imaginative Apologetics? |
| 0:55.2 | And how does it differ from other forms of apologetics, such as those that employ rational |
| 1:00.4 | argumentation? So I think you're going to love the course. You're definitely going to |
| 1:03.8 | love Holly. So enjoy lesson one from this course on Imaginative Apologetics. |
| 1:10.0 | Hi, I'm Dr. Holly Ordway. Today, we're going to be talking about Imaginative Apologetics. |
| 1:22.1 | Now, Imaginative Apologetics is the name of our course overall, and our first lesson |
| 1:27.6 | asks the question, What is Imaginative Apologetics? And I'll answer that question. But first, |
| 1:33.8 | I want to tell you two stories. And the first story is about C.S. Lewis, someone whom |
| 1:40.6 | very likely you've heard a little bit about famous author of the Chronicles of Narnia's |
| 1:46.6 | famous author of the apologetics work, Mirror Christianity, Problem of Pain, The Great |
| 1:51.1 | Divorce, many other really important works with apologetics. Now, what you might not know |
| 1:57.0 | is that Lewis was not always a Christian. He actually was an atheist as a young man having |
| 2:04.1 | rejected the Christianity of his childhood. And so he became a convert to Christianity |
| 2:10.6 | as an adult. So we might ask what brought him to become a Christian. Well, a couple of things |
... |
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