Faith, imagination, and the glory of ordinary life

The following conversation between novelist Marilynne Robinson and theologian Rowan Williams took place at Wheaton College in Illinois and was moderated by members of Wheaton’s faculty as part of a conference on the theological significance of Robinson’s work.

You’ve both written or talked about how imaginative work, particularly fiction, provides insight into the divine. How would you articulate that conviction?

Rowan Williams: People often suppose that imagination is Making Things Up. People who write even in a small way as I do know that there’s an element of real discovery in the work of the imagination. You’re generating new questions, new stimuli as you work. I’ve never—to the world’s great relief—written a novel, but I do write poems, and the experience of writing a poem is very often that sense that you half hear something and you know you’ve got to work at it, you know you’ve got to let it unfold, and you don’t quite know where it’s going and sometimes where you thought it was going is absolutely not where it ends up. All of that makes me think that the imagination really is a faculty in us which uncovers something.