The renewal of perception in religious faith and biblical narrative
Abstract
Religious faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. While such seeing may well be truthful, it is also unavoidably constructive, involving the imagination in its philosophical sense of the capacity to organize underdetermined or ambiguous sense date into a whole or gestalt. One of the characteristic ways in which biblical narratives inspire and teach is by renewing their characters’ and readers’ imagination. The texts do so not inexorably but in a similar way as (other) works of art. This paper therefore investigates the ways in which works of art engage and develop the imagination, and thereby enable renewed perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world. The paper introduces predictive processing as a helpful psychological theory for analyzing this dynamic, and outlines questions for further research.
Citation
Wolfe , J 2021 , ' The renewal of perception in religious faith and biblical narrative ' , European Journal for Philosophy of Religion , vol. 13 , no. 4 , pp. 111-128 . https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.2021.3744
Publication
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1689-8311Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 European Journal for Philosophy of Religion (EJPR). This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.2021.3744
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