The duties of managing work, home and relationships present a tyranny of daily tasks whose urgency is grounded in their practical necessity: these are the things without which we cannot live life at all or well. Given the time demands placed on us by these responsibilities, time spent developing the imagination and cultivating our sense of wonder is often at best seen as a luxury we can ill afford, and at worst as dangerously distracting flights of fancy. And yet, can we really believe that we can live life well without the space to breathe that only imagination can provide? Properly understood, imagination and wonder are not luxuries, but necessary equipment for living whose value is neither only fanciful nor practical, and equally necessary in the board room and the film room.

Tune in October 3 at 7:30pm EDT for the livestream:

Junius Johnson works in historical and systematic theology, with special interests in trinitarian theology, Christology, metaphysics, and the Eucharist. He is also especially interested in the Medieval period, and in the works of St. Bonaventure and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He holds a BA from Oral Roberts University, an MAR from Yale Divinity School, and an MA, two MPhils, and a PhD from Yale University. He is the author of Christ and Analogy: The Christocentric Metaphysics of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fortress Press, 2010), Patristic and Medieval Atonement Theory: A Guide to Research (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Bonaventure on the Eucharist: Commentary on the Sentences, Book IV, dist. 8-13 (Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 2017), and the forthcoming The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty. He is currently at work on a trilogy of monographs on Bonaventure and a translation of the Eucharistic treatises of Radbertus and Ratramnus.

Dr. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology in the Honors College at Baylor University and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Rivendell Institute at Yale.

This event is part of our Homecoming Weekend Dedication Celebration. You can view the weekend’s full line-up of events and register to let us know you’re coming here.