Just watched this excellent video of pastor and author Eugene Peterson in conversation with Dean Nelson at the Writers Symposium by the Sea. Peterson is one of my favourite writers, his books are extremely well-written, he goes into a lot of depth while still making it accessible. In this conversation Peterson discusses storytelling predominately, along with translation, imagination, and many other things.

“There are never enough storytellers… I think writing is one of the sacred callings. I wish the church would ordain writers the way they ordain pastors and professors. Give some dignity to this work of the imagination. William Blake always capitalised the word Imagination – for him it was the Holy Spirit…

The imagination is almost, not quite, the same thing as faith. It’s that which connects what we see and what we don’t see, and pulls us through what we see into what we don’t see. Now when that imagination involves trust and participation in the unseen, its faith, but imagination is the training ground for that.”

Watch the video on YouTube here.

HT: Scott