Imagination in a Christian's Life

At a mid-May lecture at Seattle Pacific University, N.T. Wright gave the lecture "The Bible and Christian Imagination." This jumped out at me then, and I just saw it again in a written transcript:

"The Bible helps us, enables us, to understand, to re-appropriate, to celebrate the role of the imagination as part of our redeemed, renewed, image-bearing humanness. You need imagination to live in God's world. The Christian church has often been bad at encouraging imagination. People have been worried, Christian teachers have been worried, about letting people imagine things, in case their imagination runs riot and they start imagining the wrong things, and so we've squelched it and squashed it and we've built buildings that are inherently ugly, lest anyone think that the buildings are somehow divine. And we've done all kinds of things, even in our worship, to prevent the glory getting out."